What is a sitemap for a website?

It's industry best practice

A major benefit to planning websites using visual sitemaps is that it forces your designer to adopt best practices in creating website structures.

Pre-planning in this way is a critical way to ensure that proper steps are taken to organize content for optimal search engine indexing and user navigation. Sitemaps are important for sites of all sizes but are particularly vital for planning large websites.

Simplifies communication

Since they don't require much clicking or reading of long, tedious strings of computer code to get the full picture, visual sitemaps are the best conduit for generating deep insights among your team.

Website plans and strategies can then be more effectively communicated to developers, other team members and clients — resulting in greater end-user satisfaction, more efficient development with fewer mistakes and greater usability of the final product.

Helps make changes & scale

Using sitemaps to plan websites in conjunction with a modern CMS like WordPress allows for greater flexibility as well as future scaling.

New pages can be easily added to existing navigational structures rather than the frequent, common and painful full-site redesigns of yesteryear.

Properly organizing a website's page structure allows for websites to grow organically over time.

Easier innovation & planning

Planning websites using sitemaps drives innovation and brings the ability to rapidly test new ideas. In the earlier days of site planning, designers would frequently piggyback off each other which meant design structures had little variation since it was just quicker and safer to copy (yikes).

Planning websites with sitemaps lets designers test out a variety of website structure scenarios before coding actually begins. This allows for visualizing and optimizing user flow and interaction in advance.