So, what is important to remember before starting to build a website?
Choose the Right Platform for Your Website
WordPress remains one of our favorite platforms for SEO. It gives SEO teams enormous flexibility over content, page structure, templates, metadata, internal links, schema, and pretty much everything else we like playing with.
Webflow, Wix, Shopify, and other platforms can all support SEO when configured correctly. And now we have an entirely new category to consider: websites built with AI coding tools and platforms such as Claude Code, Lovable, Base44, and whatever new one probably launched while we were writing this paragraph.
The important question you need to ask yourself before building your website is: “Can this setup give us control over everything search engines, AI systems, and users need?”
That includes crawlability, indexability, URLs, metadata, canonicals, redirects, structured data, XML sitemaps, internal linking, performance, mobile usability, and the ability to easily create and update content.
Whatever you build with, don’t sacrifice that control for a pretty homepage.
Keep Your Work Environment Out of Search
Even if you haven’t told anyone that you’re building a new website, Google and AI bots might find it.
A link from your hosting provider, an old domain, or an accidental external link may be enough to expose your unfinished masterpiece to search engines.
We don’t want that.
Whenever possible, build your website in a private or password-protected staging environment.
A robots.txt directive such as:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /And whatever method you choose, put this somewhere on your launch checklist in very large letters:
REMOVE THE BLOCKING BEFORE GOING LIVE.
You’d be surprised. 🙂
Yoast It Up
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast is still one of the first plugins we’d recommend considering.
Yoast gives you convenient control over many of the technical elements you’ll need, including title tags, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, robots directives, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs, and structured data.
Other SEO plugins can do similar things, so Yoast isn’t mandatory. The important thing is making sure someone has control over these elements.
Keep Images Light, but Make Them Worth Seeing
Less is More
Every script, animation, tracking pixel, plugin, widget, chatbot, slider, video background, and very-important-thing-that-marketing-absolutely-must-have comes with a cost.
That doesn’t mean don’t use JavaScript or don’t use video, and it certainly doesn’t mean your website has to look like it was built in 1998.
It means make every element earn its place.
Keep an eye on unnecessary JavaScript, third-party scripts, oversized assets, render-blocking resources, and plugins you installed three years ago and forgot existed.
Performance still matters.
HTTPS
Security has long been an integral part of the basic requirements of any site, regardless of search engines, AI and SEO.
Your entire website should run over HTTPS, HTTP versions should redirect correctly, and there should be no mixed-content issues.
Mobile First
Plan Your Site Hierarchy Before You Design It
Hierarchical Planning
Here’s where website planning becomes much more interesting in the AI era.
Before designing anything, map the information your website needs to communicate.
For a company website, that might include:
About us
Products
Solutions
Sevices
Articles
Videos & Webinars
Industries
Integrations
Your site architecture should create relationship between these areas while translating your target audience different funnels.
Most important pages should be easy and quick to reach, preferably in one click.
This helps search and AI bots understand the importance of your site’s content, and is quite crucial for all visitors to your site – human and bots.
User and Bot Navigation
Navigation is still extremely important, but forget arbitrary rules such as “Every page must be accessible within three clicks”.
Instead, ask whether your navigation helps people understand where they are, what else exists, and where they should go next.
Your main navigation should emphasize the areas most important to your users and business without overwhelming visitors with every URL on the website.
Dropdown menus are absolutely fine. Mega menus are fine too.
The question is whether they create clarity or chaos.
Group related items logically, use labels people actually understand, prioritize the most important destinations, and avoid forcing users to scan a wall of 40 equally important links.
Then support navigation with:
- Breadcrumbs
- Contextual internal links
- Related content
- Category/hub pages
- A useful footer
- XML sitemaps for search engines
Which brings us to the footer.
Example of a Good Site's Structure
A good example of a website that manages to organize a huge amount of information without making the visitor feel completely lost is HubSpot. Its main navigation is organized around a few clear paths: Products, Solutions, Pricing, and Resources, rather than trying to squeeze every important page into the top navigation.
The mega menus then add the next level of context.
Products are organized by product type, while Solutions lets visitors navigate according to use case and company size, with further groupings around Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Content, and AI. In other words, the structure reflects both what HubSpot sells and what its different audiences are trying to accomplish.
The homepage follows the same logic. It starts by explaining what HubSpot is and who it is for, followed immediately by strong trust signals, including its customer count and recognizable customer logos.
From there, the page breaks the platform into understandable concepts such as CRM, connected products, and AI, rather than throwing every individual feature at the visitor at once. Calls to action such as Get a demo and Get started free are also repeated throughout the journey.
The result is a useful example of what good website hierarchy should accomplish: give visitors a simple starting point, progressively reveal more detailed information, connect products with problems and audiences, and provide clear paths to the next relevant page.
Search engines and AI systems benefit from many of those same relationships because the architecture makes it much clearer how the company’s products, solutions, audiences, and topics fit together.
Using Structured Data
One way to improve the readability of a site is to mark its pages with structured data according to their functionality. For example, an article page can be defined as such using the following code:
