How to fix lifecycle products too deep on Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Steps for Adobe Commerce (Magento)

1. Admin → Catalog → Categories: review your category tree. Every additional category level adds a click depth; aim for no more than two sub-levels (Root → Category → Subcategory → Product = 3 clicks).
2. To flatten the hierarchy, drag a deep subcategory up one level in the category tree, or edit it and change its 'Parent Category' to a higher-level category.
3. Assign buried products to a shallower category: Catalog → Products → Edit product → Categories → add the parent or grandparent category alongside the existing deep one.
4. Content → Elements → Widgets: create a 'Catalog Product List' widget and place it on the homepage (or a top-level CMS page) filtered to the deep subcategory, giving those products a 1-click path.
5. Content → Elements → Pages → [Homepage] → Edit with Page Builder: add a 'Products' content type block showing the buried subcategory's products directly on the homepage.
6. Stores → Configuration → Catalog → Sitemap: ensure sitemap generation includes all products and resubmit to Google Search Console after restructuring. Re-run a crawl to verify depth ≤ 4.

What is lifecycle products too deep?

Click depth (sometimes called "crawl depth") is the minimum number of link clicks it takes to reach a page starting from your homepage. A product that sits inside Homepage → Category → Subcategory → Sub-subcategory → Product is 4 clicks deep. When any product requires more than 3–4 clicks to reach, it is considered "buried" in your site architecture. Search engines and shoppers both have to follow a chain of links to find it, and the longer that chain, the harder it becomes to discover.

Search engine crawlers allocate a limited "crawl budget" to each site — pages that are many clicks from the homepage receive fewer crawls and may be indexed more slowly or not at all, suppressing their rankings. Google has confirmed that page depth is a signal in how it prioritises crawling and values pages. For shoppers, every extra click is a friction point that raises the chance they leave before buying: studies consistently show conversion rates drop with each additional navigation step. Fixing deep products is one of the highest-leverage structural changes you can make, because it simultaneously improves SEO visibility and the path to purchase for real customers.

See the complete Lifecycle products too deep guide for every platform and the full background.