UX Glossary · S
Site map
Also: Sitemap
A diagram of a site's structure, and separately an XML file listing its pages for search engines.
The term covers two different things.
A site map as a design artefact is a diagram of the content structure: what exists, how it is grouped, how deep it goes. It is the output of information architecture work and the thing you argue about before designing screens.
An XML sitemap is a machine-readable file at a known location listing a site’s URLs, used by search engines to discover pages. Almost every static site generator produces one automatically.
Why the design artefact is still worth making
It is the cheapest place to see structural problems. Depth is visible: a page five levels down will not be found. Balance is visible: one section with 40 children and another with 2 usually means the grouping is wrong. Orphans are visible: content nothing links to.
It also surfaces the labelling argument early, when changing a label costs nothing.
The user-facing HTML sitemap
A third meaning, a page listing every section for humans. These were common and are now rare, largely because search and better navigation replaced them. They remain useful on large content sites as a fallback and as an internal linking aid.
In practice
Make the structure diagram before the wireframes. Discovering a structural problem while designing screen 30 means redoing 29 of them.