TL;DR
Most category structures were designed by somebody thinking about the warehouse, the supplier list, or how the business is organised internally. Almost none were designed by looking at what people search for. The tell is category pages ranking for nothing while individual products rank for scraps.
Most category structures were designed by somebody thinking about the warehouse, the supplier list, or how the business is organised internally. Almost none were designed by looking at what people search for.
Those two things overlap, and where they diverge is where a catalogue quietly loses.
The mismatch, concretely
A store organises by brand because that is how it buys. Customers search by use case. A store organises by product type because that is how the warehouse racks it. Customers search by problem.
Neither structure is wrong internally. The failure is that the category pages, the pages with the best chance of ranking on any catalogue, are named and grouped in a vocabulary nobody types.
The tell is a category page ranking for nothing while individual products rank for scraps. The hub is not a hub, because it does not correspond to a thing anybody looks for.
Why it goes unexamined
Because changing it is a migration and everybody knows it.
URLs move, internal links break, redirects have to be mapped, and the merchandising team has opinions. So the structure survives every redesign and gets treated as terrain rather than a decision. That is how a store ends up with three categories and two thousand products, or with forty categories nobody browses.
What I would look at
Do your category names match real queries? Not exactly, but recognisably. If a category is called “Workwear Solutions” and people search “waterproof work trousers”, the name is doing no work.
Give the ones that matter enough copy to function. Do not chase a number while you are at it. The 2024 Web Almanac put the median mobile home page at 364 words, so two useful paragraphs already clears the web’s average. The job is answering the buying question and creating somewhere to place a deliberate link, not hitting a length.
- Is anything a category that should be a filter, or the reverse? This is the substantive question. A brand might deserve to be a category if people search the brand plus the product type. A colour almost never does. The decision is per attribute and it is the same judgement as facets.
- How many products per category? Three categories and two thousand products means everything is reachable only by pagination, and page eight onwards is functionally invisible. Counterintuitively, more categories usually makes a site shallower.
- Does anything have one product in it? A category with one item is a duplicate of that item, competing with it.
The scale question
This is where large catalogues differ from small ones in kind rather than degree.
On a two-hundred-product store you can hand-design the taxonomy in an afternoon. On a twenty-thousand-product store the structure is generated, and the decision you are making is about rules rather than categories: which attributes become browsable, at what depth, and where the combinatorial explosion is cut off.
HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac found ecommerce software on 19.2% of mobile sites, with WooCommerce at 44.4% of those and Shopify at 25.3%. All of them ship a default taxonomy behaviour that somebody either configured or did not, and on most stores, did not.
When it is worth the migration
Rarely, and I would say so before anyone proposes one.
Worth it when category pages are getting essentially no traffic despite the products selling, when the structure prevents categories existing that clearly should, or when you are already migrating for another reason and can fold it in.
Not worth it when the current structure is merely imperfect. The cost is real and the gain is uncertain, and the diagnosis rarely changes with scale even when the numbers do.
The middle path most stores should take: keep the structure, add the categories that are missing, and give the ones that matter enough content to function as hubs. That captures most of the gain without moving a single URL.
The short version
- Most taxonomies were designed around the warehouse, not around search.
- The tell: category pages ranking for nothing while products rank for scraps.
- Category or filter is the real question, and it is per attribute.
- Too few categories creates depth. More categories makes a site shallower.
- A category with one product competes with that product.
- At scale you are designing rules, not categories.
- Usually do not migrate. Add what is missing and make the hubs real.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Ecommerce SEO covers architecture, categories and facets. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
