AI & Automation
Personas
Ecommerce
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
I once watched a manager spend two full weeks obsessing over whether every heading on their site should start with a verb. Two weeks. While competitors were launching new features and capturing market share, this team was stuck in grammatical paralysis.
This wasn't an isolated incident. Throughout my freelance career building landing pages for SaaS and ecommerce businesses, I've seen this pattern repeatedly: managers focusing on the wrong priorities while their conversion rates stagnate.
Here's what I've learned after countless projects: Most businesses treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory. Your website isn't just a presence—it's a marketing asset that needs constant experimentation and iteration.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why following "best practices" for content hierarchy can kill your conversions
The real-world case study where I doubled conversion rates by ignoring every rule
My testing framework for finding what actually works for your specific audience
When to break the rules (and when to follow them)
The psychology behind why users don't read content the way we think they do
Reality Check
What the gurus won't tell you about content hierarchy
If you've read any marketing blog in the past decade, you've heard the gospel of content hierarchy. The industry has created a set of "universal truths" that supposedly work for every website:
F-pattern reading: Users scan in an F-shaped pattern, so put your most important information top-left
Inverted pyramid structure: Lead with conclusions, then supporting details
7±2 rule: Limit navigation and content groups to 5-9 items
Above-the-fold obsession: Everything important must be visible without scrolling
Progressive disclosure: Reveal information gradually to avoid overwhelming users
These principles exist because they're based on legitimate research. The F-pattern studies are real. The cognitive load theory behind the 7±2 rule is sound. Progressive disclosure does reduce overwhelm in many contexts.
But here's where the industry gets it wrong: they assume your users behave like the users in those studies. They assume your product, your audience, and your context are identical to the research conditions.
The reality? Your e-commerce customers browsing 1,000+ products behave completely differently than users reading news articles. Your B2B software buyers have different scanning patterns than consumers looking for restaurants. Your mobile users interact with hierarchy differently than desktop users.
Most dangerously, following these "best practices" creates identical websites across entire industries. When everyone follows the same playbook, no one stands out. Your carefully crafted hierarchy becomes invisible background noise.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
Last year, I took on a Shopify website revamp for a client drowning in their own success. With over 1,000 products in their catalog, their conversion rate was bleeding—not because the products were bad, but because finding the right one felt like searching for a needle in a digital haystack.
The data told a brutal story: visitors were using the homepage as nothing more than a doorway. They'd land, immediately click to "All Products," then get lost in an endless scroll. The homepage had become irrelevant.
My first instinct was to follow every content hierarchy best practice I'd learned. I spent weeks crafting the perfect progressive disclosure system. Featured collections in neat categories. Clear navigation with exactly 7 main sections. Hero banners that followed the F-pattern perfectly.
The result? Marginally better engagement, but conversion rates barely moved. We were still bleeding money.
That's when I had my uncomfortable realization: I was optimizing for what I thought users should do, not what they actually wanted to do. The analytics showed me the brutal truth—visitors weren't following my carefully designed hierarchy. They were fighting against it.
The conventional wisdom said to create clear category structures and guide users through a logical product discovery journey. But my users didn't want a journey. They wanted to browse, compare, and find the perfect item quickly. They were treating my site like a physical store where they could wander and discover, not like a catalog where they needed guided navigation.
This mismatch between best practices and user behavior was costing my client thousands in lost conversions every month.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's exactly what I did to turn around this failing hierarchy experiment, and the framework you can use to do the same:
Step 1: Data-Driven Hierarchy Audit
Instead of assuming how users navigate, I analyzed actual behavior. Using heatmaps and session recordings, I discovered visitors were completely ignoring my carefully crafted category structure. They were using search, filtering, and—most surprisingly—just scrolling through everything.
Step 2: The Radical Restructure
Against every "best practice" I'd learned, I made a controversial decision: I turned the homepage into the catalog itself. Instead of featuring 6-8 curated collections, I displayed 48 products directly on the homepage with infinite scroll.
Here's what I removed:
Traditional hero banner
"Featured Collections" sections
Complex category navigation
Progressive disclosure elements
Here's what I added:
Mega-menu navigation with 50+ categories
AI-powered product categorization workflow
Product grid starting immediately below the fold
One testimonials section after 48 products
Step 3: The AI Categorization System
To make this massive product display navigable, I built an AI workflow that automatically sorted new products into 50+ existing categories. This solved the "hierarchy at scale" problem that most businesses face when they grow beyond simple category structures.
Step 4: Testing Against Conventional Wisdom
I A/B tested this radical approach against the "proper" hierarchy structure. The results shocked everyone involved—the product-first homepage converted 2x better than the traditional structure.
More importantly, the homepage reclaimed its position as the most viewed AND most used page on the site. Users weren't bouncing—they were engaging deeply with the product catalog directly.
Step 5: The Replication Framework
This success taught me to create a systematic approach to hierarchy testing:
Audit current user behavior (not assumptions)
Identify the biggest friction points in your existing hierarchy
Design a test that eliminates friction, even if it breaks "rules"
Measure engagement AND conversion, not just time-on-page
Scale what works, regardless of industry standards
User Behavior
Real data beats design theory every time. Track how users actually navigate, not how you think they should.
Friction Analysis
Identify where users get stuck in your current hierarchy. These friction points are your biggest conversion opportunities.
Bold Testing
Don't A/B test button colors. Test completely different approaches to content organization and hierarchy.
Scaling Systems
When you find what works, build systems (like AI categorization) to maintain effectiveness as you grow.
The results spoke for themselves and challenged everything I thought I knew about content hierarchy:
Conversion Impact: The product-first homepage converted 2x better than the traditional hierarchy structure. More importantly, visitors were making purchase decisions faster—the time from landing to adding items to cart decreased by 35%.
Engagement Metrics: The homepage went from being a gateway page to the most engaged page on the site. Session duration on the homepage increased by 150%, and the bounce rate dropped from 78% to 42%.
Business Impact: Within three months, monthly revenue increased by 40% without any changes to traffic volume or ad spend. The client was able to reduce their customer acquisition cost because more visitors were converting.
Unexpected Discovery: The mega-menu navigation became a powerful conversion tool. Users who interacted with the categorized menu had a 60% higher conversion rate than those who didn't, proving that hierarchy still mattered—just not where we expected it to.
This project taught me that the best hierarchy is the one that matches your users' natural behavior, not the one that follows design school principles.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the seven critical lessons learned from breaking content hierarchy "best practices":
Best practices are starting points, not finish lines. They're based on average users in average contexts. Your users might not be average.
Data beats intuition every time. What feels "wrong" to you as a designer might feel "right" to your users. Let behavior data guide decisions.
Friction kills conversions more than imperfect hierarchy. Sometimes the best hierarchy is the one that removes the most steps, even if it looks unconventional.
Context is everything. E-commerce browsing behavior is different from content consumption. B2B research is different from consumer shopping. Design accordingly.
Scale changes everything. Hierarchy rules that work for 50 products break down at 1,000+ products. Plan for your growth trajectory.
Mobile changes everything. Hierarchy that works on desktop often fails on mobile. Test both contexts separately.
When everyone follows the same rules, no one stands out. Sometimes breaking conventions is the best way to capture attention and drive action.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS platforms looking to optimize content hierarchy:
Prioritize feature discovery over perfect information architecture
Use progressive onboarding instead of progressive disclosure
Test integration-first vs. feature-first homepage structures
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores implementing hierarchy optimization:
Product-first layouts often outperform category-first designs
Mega-menus work better than simplified navigation for large catalogs
Consider infinite scroll for browsing-heavy user behaviors