Click depth: The smallest number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the home page by following links. The home page is at depth 0, anything it links to is at depth 1, and so on.
Why it matters
Click depth is a rough proxy for how important a site treats a page. Pages linked from the home page or main menu are found quickly and re-crawled often; pages that take six clicks through paginated archives to reach are found late and visited less. Google’s John Mueller said in a 2018 hangout that a page one click from the home page looks more important than one several clicks in, and that Google doesn’t count the slashes in a URL (as reported by Search Engine Journal). Google has never published a depth limit, so treat the common “three clicks” rule as a planning heuristic, not a ranking rule.
Depth is measured by following links, not by reading the URL. A recipe at /recipes/bread/sourdough/ looks three levels deep, but if the home page links to it directly it sits at depth 1. A post at /my-post/ looks shallow but may sit at depth 11 if the only path is /page/2/, /page/3/ and onward through the blog archive.
Where WordPress buries pages
- Paginated blog archives. The page size is set under Settings › Reading › “Blog pages show at most”; at 10 posts per page, a site with 400 posts has a 40-page archive.
- Categories with hundreds of posts and no sub-categories or hub page.
- Posts whose only inbound links are from the archive, which is the same as being nearly orphaned.
How to check and reduce it
A crawler starting at the home page reports the shortest path to every URL. The click depth checker does this for free. Then flatten the paths that matter: link to key guides from a hub or pillar page, add breadcrumbs, and add contextual links from popular older posts. The guide to click depth goes further into which fixes are worth making first. Click depth also feeds into how your whole site architecture holds together.