What is content architecture and why does it matter?

Websites are a lot like buildings. You find an entrance, walk inside, and then look around for the room, department, or floor that you need to reach. The type of building that you’re in affects that experience: in a supermarket, you understand that you’ll be navigating a space filled with a series of aisles; in a stadium you might need to walk in a circuit, or climb steps, to reach your seat; in a city center skyscraper, you’d pass a reception desk in the foyer, look for an elevator to an office, and so on.

The point is, it’s not enough just to get people through the door, the organization of a space plays a big part in the way that visitors understand the things inside it. 

That’s the same for the content displayed on websites. The structure and organization of content shapes the way people move around the digital space. And if visitors struggle to reach the content they’re looking for on your site, there’s a downstream impact for your brand, and, eventually, for sales — especially if there are easier browsing experiences to be found elsewhere. 

Fortunately, you can address that problem by thinking about the way that content is organized on your website — in other words, your content architecture. 

In this post, we’re going to explain what content architecture is, why you should care about it, and how to optimize it for your digital experiences. 

Content architecture defined

Simply put, content architecture refers to the way that content is structured and arranged for users of your website. 

This means that when someone clicks on a “Products” menu, they’re taken to a subcategory page that they intuitively understand displays the products you sell, or when they reach a “Resource hub” page, they find the various resources available to them quickly. 

Those examples may be simplistic but they demonstrate the intuitive, efficient, hierarchic structure that should drive content experiences — on your website, your mobile site, tablets, wearables, and any other digital channel. That structure, or architecture, not only helps users find content, but understand it and its place within the wider content ecosystem.  

Why does content architecture matter?

User experience should be a priority of your content strategy. That’s especially important in ecommerce where almost 80% of online shoppers will abandon their carts if they experience friction during the purchase process. Essentially, the smoother and more satisfying a visit to a website, the more likely it is that a brand turns customer interest into a sale, and a sale into repeat business.

With that in mind, good content architecture facilitates better user experiences. So, if you've worked hard on a content strategy, and set out goals for your website, your content architecture will help you understand where content should go to achieve them. That means making your product specs easy to find on their product pages, making sure you don’t hide the “add to cart” button, making the payment gateway easy to navigate, and anything else you can shape via intuitive content organization. 

Good architecture also makes it easier to build content experiences, which means that it's relevant to every stage of the development and content creation process — from the design of a site’s back end to content presentation in its front end. Content stored in a centralized location, for example, will be easier for marketers to find and reuse in any part of the digital infrastructure. Meanwhile, editors can update all instances of a piece of content from that location, simultaneously, without having to tediously cut and paste the changes everywhere.  

Content architecture vs. information architecture 

Let’s pause for a second to talk about information architecture. It’s a term used in close proximity to content architecture, but it’s worth making a distinction. 

Where content architecture refers to the organization and structure of content itself, information architecture refers to organization and structure of the information that content communicates to users. Information architecture is primarily a frontend content concern that refers to information hierarchies, how information is labeled, and how usable and useful it is. 

For example, when thinking about content architecture, you might decide to arrange a row of drop-down menus at the top of each page to help users navigate the different areas of your website. When thinking about information architecture, you’d decide what information each of those dropdowns contained: a list of products, a list of industries, a list of partners, and so on. 

There’s a lot of crossover between information architecture and content architecture, and many people frame the former as a subset of the latter. However, it's worth thinking about both when you're developing your content strategy and tech stack, since both ultimately contribute to the user experience.  

Content architecture and content management

Your content management system (CMS) is critical to your website’s content architecture. For example, it’s probably not optimal to have to deal with coding complications every time you want to upload content (of any kind), especially if it’s nontechnical team members, like content creators, marketers, and editors, who are the ones using the CMS.  

Instead, you want to implement a CMS that makes content creation and publication as smooth and intuitive as possible — which means making it easy for content and marketing teams to find content, upload new content, and update existing content, without disrupting wider site infrastructure.  

Ideally, that means opting for a headless content management system which separates its backend administrative layer from its frontend presentation layer, or head.

In a headless CMS, communication between the back and front ends is handled by an application programming interface (API). Since content is untangled from code in this environment, developers have complete freedom and flexibility when designing content experiences, and can add new functionalities like modular building blocks. Headlessness also enables organizations to build content architecture into the editorial journey, making it easier for editors, creators, and marketers to understand that infrastructure, and use their insight to optimize content. 

Some CMSes go a step beyond headlessness, offering completely composable content architecture in which developers build both the back end and front end of their systems from the ground up. 

There's a lot more to say about how the capabilities of composable content management system architecture enhance content experiences, but for now, let’s focus on optimizing your content architecture.

Content architecture and artificial intelligence

In headless and composable environments, it’s easier to integrate innovations that help with the creation and management of content architectures. Contentful, for example, offers an AI content modeling tool that enables users to generate optimized content types to build out their content models. The tool is accessible for nontechnical users which means they can help developers fine-tune architecture to facilitate the content strategy and achieve content goals. 

Content architecture fundamentals

To work with and optimize content architecture, you’ll need to be familiar with a few key elements.

Content models

Content modeling refers to the identification of the specific content that you’re going to need to build your website and meet your content strategy goals. During the content modeling phase, you’ll create content blueprints, essentially classifying content by function or type (header, byline, image, body text, keyword, topic, and so on). Content modeling, and the content model (or content models) that you produce as a result, will help you define the appearance of your site and your pages, and understand how elements of content relate to each other. 

SEO metadata

Metadata provides information about data itself, and is used to communicate the type and function of content elements (title, header, image, keyword, etc.). Metadata is important for content visibility because it indicates important details about content to search engines. 

Navigation

Navigation describes the means by which users find and move between different pieces of content. Navigation mechanics may be included as part of your content model, and can inform the development of content architecture — that means thinking about the depth of content on certain pages, how menus are presented and structured, where and if links are included in pages, and so on. 

Wireframing

A wireframe is a first draft iteration of a specific web page layout, with content represented in outline, often to visualise the aesthetic and functionality of a content model. Wireframing is essentially a rough draft that enables developers and content creators to plot relationships between content elements, site navigation, and other desired features and functionalities.   

Workflows

Workflows represent collections of processes required to achieve business objectives. Content architecture facilitates workflows by making it easier for contributors to understand their roles as part of those wider processes —  from content team members that create, edit, and submit content to a CMS, to marketers that store, publish, and update it, and retire it at the end of its lifecycle. 

Structuring

The process of structuring content involves breaking digital content down into its structural parts so that it can be defined and used in any part of the content ecosystem. Here, content components are classified by type and purpose (header, byline, author bio, etc.) and then can be assembled with other components to build out larger, structured content models: blog articles, customer reviews, and so on. 

The benefits of good content architecture

So, what are some of the specific ways that good content architecture helps brands build better websites, and better customer experiences?

Content organization

Good content architecture ensures that page layouts remain clean and organized throughout the day-to-day content churn, and throughout marketing campaigns and cycles. That organization serves as a guideline for stakeholders at every stage of the content workflow, and delivers benefits that stack on top of each other — in the first instance, for example, it supports the building of content models, which, in turn, supports the effective assembly of structured content, which supports consistency of brand voice, and so on.

Content opportunities

Content architecture helps brands identify gaps in their content strategy, logical inconsistencies in page layouts, or friction in customer experiences. A product review page, for example, with no product images might be frustrating and confusing for many users. By focusing on content architecture, developers and marketers can identify those missing parts of the experience, and take steps to fill them.  

Platform visibility

By setting out content infrastructure in a clear, organized, and intuitive way, stakeholders in relevant workflows can see where every piece of content lives, and how the components of the tech stack connect. That visibility has several benefits: first, it increases editorial efficiency, since creators and editors can find, and work with, content more easily. Secondly, it improves customer experiences because it becomes easier for developers to identify which parts of the website are working, and which are causing friction. Finally, it provides financial benefits because it makes it easier to identify redundant (or inefficient) components in the tech stack and opportunities to integrate cost-saving innovations. 

Collaboration 

By serving as a guideline for the visual arrangement of content (or content models), content architecture enhances the potential for collaboration between developers, designers, the content team, and the marketing team. With content architecture as an anchor, those stakeholders can converge around shared goals, and work with greater visibility of each other’s needs: developers gain a greater understanding of how editors handle content review, editors learn how marketers approach seasonal campaigns, and so on. That collaborative momentum ultimately generates better content outcomes, and enhances the consistency and quality of the browsing experience.   

Personalization

The better organized your website content, the more effectively you can retrieve specific pieces of content, and present them on the page in a way that appeals to customers on a customized, personal level. Online personalization depends on the capability of brands to deploy specific content for specific audiences — a process that is typically challenging in inflexible content environments. 

Omnichannel

By helping brands structure content, content architecture makes omnichannel content strategies easier to execute. Omnichannel content can be used, and reused, anywhere within a brand’s digital environment without generating formatting risks. It also means that customers receive optimized, consistent browsing experiences across multiple channels — desktop, phones, tablets, wearables, store displays, and so on. 

Creating content architecture with Contentful

Content architecture is one of the key elements of website development — one that multiplies the impact of the content strategies, and the workflows, that it supports. With that in mind, you’ll need a CMS that ensures you’re able to build content architecture that aligns your content strategy.  

The Contentful® Composable Content Platform is designed for that purpose. An API-first, headless content management system, Contentful makes no assumptions about what you want your content architecture to look like: whatever your content strategy, we’ll help you design and deploy the digital infrastructure you need to achieve it. 

Create your back end and front end from the ground up; add features and functionalities to your tech stack, like building blocks; scale your framework effortlessly; and deploy structured content that can be used, and reused, endlessly across channels. If you’re ready to start optimizing your content architecture, check out the Contentful Marketplace to find the tools you need to get started.

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