Your Overview Page Deserves a Little Respect

A client and I were discussing an overview page on their website recently. They said: “This page doesn’t get any traffic. Can we just get rid of it?”

Built in 2018, the page in question hadn’t been kept up to date and no longer accurately reflected that section of the site. There also wasn’t anything unique or compelling on this page to signal an underlying purpose.

The client experienced a weak page. But “weak” isn’t a diagnosis. Before deciding to trash your neglected overview page, it’s worth considering whether low traffic is the problem – or – does the weak content and performance indicate an unrealized potential and purpose?

When you add a new service, launch a new program, or publish a new event series, the child pages get all of the attention. Your overview page sits there, waiting for you to refresh it’s content, as it slowly becomes less useful and out of date.

From my standpoint as a Sage Web Developer (TM), an overview page is often a key structure within your site architecture:

• It creates meaningful relationships between pages
• It gives visitors context before they go deeper
• It helps keeps navigation consistent

That’s not nothing.

Let’s take a look at what the overlooked overview page is intended to do, whether that function is still valid, and how we can craft the content and structure to make the best darn overview page possible.

Inside an overview page

If your site has a Services section with individual pages for each service, the page at /services/ is your overview page. Same idea for an Industries section, a Resources hub, or an Events section with individual event pages listed under it.

In WordPress and most content management systems, this is termed a parent and child relationship. The parent page holds the broader context; what this section is, why it exists, how the pieces relate to each other. Child pages inherit that context and go deeper, each one handling a specific service, event, or program in detail.

The connection between them supports both roles. The parent page without children is a collection of summaries with nowhere to go. Child pages without a parent are isolated. They are harder to navigate back from, harder to understand in relation to each other, harder for anyone (or any search engine) to read as a coherent whole.

This parent-child structure also makes breadcrumb navigation¹ helpful. That small trail at the top of a page — Books › Fiction › Literary Fiction — help visitors knows where they are and how to get back. But they only work when the hierarchy is meaningful. If the structure is flat, or when the parent URL returns a 404, breadcrumbs lose that meaning.

Overview pages help orient people, but that’s not all!

Websites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increases their rate of failure.

Jared Spool, The Secret Lives of Links

Research on physical wayfinding² offers a useful frame here. Intersections are critical decision points: the places where people pause, look around, gather information, and choose a direction. Importantly, people tend to defer that decision until they arrive at the intersection, where they can actually see their options.

When someone clicks “Services” or “Events” in your navigation, they usually aren’t ready to commit to one specific thing. They’re orienting in a content intersection.

A well-structured overview page gives visitors a place to self-select, read a short summary of each option, and move toward the one that fits their situation, instead of bouncing between detail pages trying to figure out the difference.

Routing is only one of the jobs an overview page can do. For some sections of a site, it can also provide substantial context.

Some overview pages carry meaning that child pages can’t

Individual pages are good at details: dates, locations, focused content, unique calls to action. What they can’t do as easily is develop the bigger picture.

Take a community organization that hosts events throughout the year. Each event page does its job: here’s what’s happening, here’s when, here’s how to get involved. But none of those pages can fully answer the question behind the question: why does this organization put on events?

That story belongs on the overview page. Not buried in a summarized history on an About page – right here, at the top of the top-level Events page!

The listed events might connect neighbors who don’t otherwise cross paths. They might raise visibility and foot traffic for local businesses. Or direct money to community nonprofits through admission fees or vendor participation. They could be the thing that makes a town feel like a place people want to live in, come back to, tell others about. That’s a mission. And a list of events or stand-alone event pages, no matter how well-written, just doesn’t communicate that broader purpose.

This applies anywhere the whole is more than the sum of its parts:

• A nonprofit’s programs section
• A chamber of commerce’s business services section
• A university department’s research initiatives
• A service firm’s areas of expertise

In each case, the individual pages explain what each thing is. The overview page explains why it matters and helps guide visitors to information and/or action. For a visitor who is still deciding what they want to do, or search engines trying to understand a section of your site, the overview page is a cornerstone³.

Navigation shouldn’t be unpredictable

Author and UX Consultant Steve Krug is perhaps best known for his book, “Don’t Make Me Think“. Required reading for anyone interested in improving the usability of their website, the title is also a great mantra to keep in mind when designing page content or structure.

Many websites handle the parent page in one of two ways: they skip it entirely and make the nav item a dropdown trigger with no destination, or they build a page that’s essentially just a list of links.

Issues with the first approach, using an empty link as a dropdown trigger:

• An empty link (e.g., <a href="#">) provides no destination URL, so Google’s crawlers cannot follow it to discover or index any linked sub-pages. It does not pass link equity to any destination, and it’s not a valid way to link to sub-content.
• Screen reader users expect top-level items to either be links or buttons with clear roles.
• Many users expect top-level navigation items to be clickable, especially if they appear similar to other links.
• On touch devices, there’s no hover, so dropdowns must be triggered by tap.

While it is true that a lot of users do not know they can (usually) click on a top-level link that has a dropdown menu to get to an overview or parent page, your own website menu may be perpetuating the unpredictable navigation faux pas:

If I clicked on “About” and “Contact” and they both go to real pages, why doesn’t “Services”? Maybe I did it wrong?

click-click-CLICK! (the user has rage clicked and left the site)

The assumption might be that most visitors arrive from search, land directly on the page they need, and never browse. Why build parent-child content relationships if nobody’s following these pathways?

But, the question suggests a solution before we fully consider the user needs. If someone wants to explore, or needs context before they can make sense of what they’re looking at, or is trying to figure out whether this organization does anything else worth knowing about – your overview page is a critical point of entry.

As Mr. Krug suggests, “Don’t make your users think”. Predictability builds trust. Indecision makes it harder for people to guess correctly and more likely to choose wrong in successive clicks.

A better overview page

Publishing a page with some links to sub-pages on it is not the same as building a useful overview page.

Too often we see landing pages with very little text and a big image on the first screenful. Even when those pages do contain the right information for the user, in many situations they don’t provide enough context to tell people whether they are on the right track. As a result, users don’t bother scrolling anymore in search of the right information, nor do they click on any visible link: they quickly decide that the page is not worth exploring any longer and simply leave. Thus, the good information scent that the link to the site may have provided (for example, on a search-results page) is wasted by the poor context provided by the actual page.

Raluca Budio, NN/G, Information Scent: How Users Decide Where to Go Next

The best version of an overview page improves clarity for visitors, makes the whole section feel coherent, and gives search engines a clean map of how the pages relate.

A few things that should be on every overview page:

• A brief intro that frames the category. Two or three sentences that tell a first-time visitor what this section covers and why it exists.
• A summary of each child page, with a link. Not just a heading and a link, an actual sentence or two that explains what the child page covers and who should go there.
• Clear, descriptive links. Avoid “Learn more” link text that doesn’t tell people what to expect. “View dog washing packages” or “See summer festival details” tells someone exactly what they’ll find. Or, use your Page Title as the link!
• Any context that applies to the whole category. The kind of information a visitor needs to understand before they can make sense of the individual pages.

Build it for people, and the search benefits follow. A page with real content, clear structure, and meaningful internal links is genuinely helpful and unique.

When to skip the overview page?

A site with only two or three child pages under a section may not need a dedicated overview because the dropdown itself is short enough to scan, and a parent page might feel like an extra click to get somewhere that was already visible. Other reasons you might want to skip it:

• A single-service or single-product site has no branching to manage.
• When the pages are so distinct that no meaningful context connects them.

A related case worth its own conversation: location pages. It’s a common local SEO tactic to create a network of city or region-specific pages primarily to capture local search traffic. A “service-areas” parent in your URL structure makes sense because it groups those pages cleanly and signals their relationship to search engines.

But that parent doesn’t necessarily need to be a developed content page. When that parent is indexable, thin, and adds no unique angle it’s better to keep it very minimal and clearly navigational.

Where there is something non-trivial to say at the parent level (e.g., explaining overall coverage, how service areas work, distance constraints, or cross-location FAQs), then it can be more than a mere content container.

An overview page is never really finished

Remember that page from 2018? The one that hadn’t been touched while the rest of the section grew up around it? That’s the most common situation website owners face. Your website isn’t static. It’s a content garden that needs pruning and attention.

Treat your overview page the way you’d treat a Menu Du Jour: any time something is added, removed, or meaningfully changed in that section of your site, the overview page should reflect it. That’s content strategy in practice, an ongoing review of content that ensures it supports your business and the people using your site.

Block editor tip: Using a query loop bock in WordPress is one easy way to sync your content updates. In addition to displaying posts, the query loop can also pull in pages with a shared parent. You can create a unique style for how this content displays so it doesn’t just feel like a blog archive view.

Assess your overview pages, give ’em a little respect

Overview pages are easy to overlook because they don’t get updated the way service pages or blog posts do. Check in on your parent pages — for services, events, programs, or anything else with child pages underneath it — incorporate them into your regularly scheduled content reviews⁴.

• Does it give visitors enough context to understand what this section is and why it exists?
• Does it briefly explain how the child pages differ from each other?
• Does your top-level navigation item go to this page, or does it only open a menu?
• Is the content actually current?

If you find gaps, that’s good news! An overview page with unrealized potential is one of the easier wins for people and search. A focused update can improve navigation, strengthen your site structure, and give visitors a better sense of what you’re about. Your structure is there. It just needs a little time and respect.

1. A note on the humble breadcrumb: Breadcrumbs are important supplemental navigation, especially for more complex sites. They help visitors build a mental model of your site, where this page lives and what else might be nearby. Breadcrumbs also support internal linking, which distributes relevance across related pages. A well-structured breadcrumb trail reinforces the same topical relationships your URL structure and parent/child hierarchy are already signaling. ↩︎
2. Brunyé, T.T., Gardony, A.L., Holmes, A. et al. Spatial decision dynamics during wayfinding: intersections prompt the decision-making process. Cogn. Research 3, 13 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-018-0098-3 ↩︎
3. The term “content cornerstone” is used in Yoast’s WordPress SEO tool to describe your most important, high-ranking content. The articles you most want Google to notice. But an overview page is a cornerstone in the structural sense: the page that anchors a section of your site. Take it away — or let it go to seed — and the structure it was supporting starts to show it. ↩︎
4. Schedule a monthly or quarterly content review, plan a half day to review a section of your website and make it better by clearing out the R.O.T.! ↩︎