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Graphitized carbon nitride (g-C₃N₄), as a metal-free, visible-light-responsive photocatalyst, has a very broad application prospect in the fields of solar energy conversion and environmental remediation. The g-C₃N₄ photocatalyst owns a series of conspicuous characteristics, such as very suitable band structure, strong physicochemical stability, abundant reserves, low cost, etc. Research on the g-C₃N₄ or g-C₃N₄-based photocatalysts for real applications has become a competitive hot topic and a frontier area with thousands of publications over the past 17 years. In this paper, we carefully reviewed the recent advances in the synthesis and structural design of g-C₃N₄ materials for efficient photocatalysts. First, the crucial synthesis parameters of g-C₃N₄ were fully discussed, including the categories of g-C₃N₄ precursors, reaction temperature, reaction atmosphere and reaction duration. Second, the construction approaches of various nanostructures were surveyed in detail, such as hard and soft template, supramolecular preorganization and template-free approaches. Third, the characteristics of different exfoliation methods were compared and summarized. At the end, the problems of g-C₃N₄ materials in photocatalysis and the prospect of further development were disclosed and proposed to provide some key guidance for designing more efficient and applicable g-C₃N₄ or g-C₃N₄-based photocatalysts.