What Is Click Depth?

Date First Published: 4th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what click depth is in this article.

Click depth is the total number of internal links a user must click through to access a page on a website. The homepage starts with a click depth of 0 and any subpages linked from the homepage have a click depth of 1. For example, if a product page was linked from a product subcategory page, which was also linked from the product category page and then the homepage, that page has a click depth of 3 as visitors would have to click through three internal links to get to that page.

Note:

Click depth is not to be confused with the depth of a page in relation to the hierarchical structure of the website. For example, if a page could be accessed at the URL: 'https://example.com/products/category/subcategory/product-1.html', and it had an internal link on the homepage, the click depth would be 1, not 3. It is three directories deep into the website, but visitors only have to click through one internal link to get to the page.

What is The Ideal Click Depth?

Ideally, the click depth should not be more than 3. A click depth of deeper than 3 may cause Google and other search engines to struggle to crawl the page.

How To Reduce Click Depth?

It is important for click depth to be considered as a high click depth can give a bad user experience since they will have to spend a long time clicking through subpages to get to the page they were looking for. Optimising a website for a lower click depth can improve its performance. However, it is important to not go over the top as depending on the size of the site, directly linking to all the subpages of a website on the homepage is not possible and will make the page look cluttered and messy without any structure. Ways of reducing click depth can be seen below.

Create a breadcrumb trail navigation

A breadcrumb trail, also known as breadcrumb navigation, or breadcrumbs, is a user interface element displayed outside the navigation bar that allows users to trace the directory path of the current page they are visiting. It displays a hierarchy of the current page in relation to the structure of the website. Since these contain internal links to other directories, this will reduce the click depth of pages located in certain directories.

Ensure that pages contain internal links

Internal links are a quicker way for visitors to find a page. When writing a piece of content, ensure that it contains internal links to other pages. For example, when mentioning the name of a product on an ecommerce site, an internal link could be embedded into the page that directs users to that page. Without internal links, visitors would have to rely on the navigation menu of the site to find subpages, which is time-consuming. It would be most beneficial to place internal links onto pages with a low click depth of 1.

Avoid using too many levels of hierarchy

Directories, which are used to create a hierarchical structure and organise pages by categories and subcategories are useful for organising a site, but it is important to not use too many levels. Using a wide hierarchy with a large number of lower-level categories and a few top-level categories can greatly increase click depth. Using a smaller hierarchy with more top-level categories and fewer lower-level categories will allow visitors to access subpages in fewer clicks.

Create a sitemap

This is not to be confused with an XML sitemap used by search engines. A sitemap is a HTML file, that presents a hierarchical view of the pages of a website used to help visitors find what they are looking for. The homepage will always be at the top of the sitemap and below, the different directories and subpages are included. The sitemap is usually linked to in the footer which appears on every page in the website. This will then reduce the click depth of all pages that are listed in the sitemap.

SEO

Click depth is important for SEO as internal links to other pages are what web crawlers rely on to crawl and index pages. Brendan Bennett of Selesti says that Google’s web crawlers are unlikely to browse pages over three clicks from the homepage unless the website is considered to be extremely authoritative. This means that pages beyond three clicks away will unlikely be indexed by Google or attract any organic traffic. In a Google Webmaster Central hangout in 2018, John Mueller talked about click depth. He stated that:

"What does matter for us… is how easy it is to actually find the content. So especially if your homepage is generally the strongest page on your website, and from the homepage, it takes multiple clicks to actually get to one of these stores, then that makes it a lot harder for us to understand that these stores are actually pretty important."

"On the other hand, if it’s one click from the homepage to one of these stores, then that tells us that these stores are probably pretty relevant, and that probably we should be giving them a little bit of weight in the search results as well. So it’s more a matter of how many links you have to click through to actually get to that content rather than what the URL structure itself looks like."