What this check inspects
Shipwork builds the site map from your sitemap and the pages it reads, then follows the internal links between them to build a directed graph. Starting from the home page, it measures the click depth of every page it can reach. It then reports three things: pages the sitemap lists that no other page links to, pages more than three clicks from the home page, and pages that link nowhere themselves.
What a failure means
An orphan page, one the sitemap promises but nothing links to, is a warning: it depends on the sitemap alone and collects no internal authority. A page more than three clicks from the home page is a warning, because deep pages are crawled less and are harder for visitors to find. A dead end, a page with no outgoing links, is a warning because it gives a visitor nowhere to go next. All three are warnings rather than errors, since the page still works and can still be indexed.
How to fix it
- Add a link from a relevant, linked page to each orphan listed, or remove it from the sitemap if it does not belong.
- Flatten the main navigation so important pages sit within three clicks of the home page.
- Add contextual links to and from the deep pages that already exist, instead of relying on a long menu chain.
- Give every page at least one link to a relevant next step, so a visitor never lands on a dead end.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA store adds a new size guide page to the sitemap and links it from one collection page, but that collection page is only reachable through a filter that no menu exposes.
What the check reportsThe check reports the size guide as more than three clicks from the home page, and a set of account and policy pages, listed in the sitemap, that nothing links to at all.
The pointThe pages exist and are indexed, and they still cannot be found by a visitor moving through the store. The graph, not the page, is the problem.