Users want instant guidance when they land and navigate on your site, but it’s not practical to do that on your own.
Breadcrumbs solves this problem by automatically helping users trace their steps on the website by showing them their current location and the steps taken to get there.
Why is this important and how can you do it? In this post, we’ll take you through what breadcrumbs are, provide examples and illustrations of what they look like, and possibly how to create them on your site.
So, follow along.
What is breadcrumb navigation?
Breadcrumbs are a navigational aid that allows users to keep track of their current location on a website.
A breadcrumb trail displays the page a user is currently on and its relation to the pages they visited before it, or the hierarchy of higher-level parent pages above the current page.
For example, here is the breadcrumb of this article on Legiit Backlinks: The Backbone of SEO Success - Understanding their Vital Role.
If you follow the trail above backward, you’ll eventually land on the homepage where you can do something else.
On top of that, when you search on Google, the SERPs show breadcrumbs of pages making it a no-brainer for SEOs to use it.
This is because it gives users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your site.
Advantages of using breadcrumbs
In this section, we’ll take through some of the advantages of using breadcrumbs on your site, so that you can decide whether you want to use them or not.
#1. Improved SEO
Google loves breadcrumbs because they provide structured data on your site which helps them to understand its structure and relationship between different pages.
Secondly, these breadcrumbs help visitors to navigate your site in search of information, products, and services.
Thirdly, Google can include breadcrumbs in the search results for your website, if you have used them.
These three factors combined can give your business a significant boost in terms of rankings and traffic.
#2. They enhance the user experience
Breadcrumbs make navigation by users on a site easy and traceable. By displaying the path from the homepage to the current page, they help users maintain their sense of orientation within the website.
This can reduce confusion and frustration, especially for first-time visitors or users unfamiliar with the site's layout.
Again, this can be advantageous for e-commerce sites, where users may need to backtrack to previous categories or product pages.
Ultimately, breadcrumbs can help reduce the bounce rate—the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only a single page.
#3. They are economical on space
Since breadcrumbs are horizontally and plainly styled, they don’t take up a lot of space on a website page.
This makes them have little to no negative impact on the content overload and the benefits in terms of user experience are priceless.
Sounds cool, right?
Next.
Types of Breadcrumb Navigation
There are actually a few different styles of breadcrumb navigation that web designers can choose from.
#1. Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs
The first style is the location-based breadcrumb. Instead of showing the full path, this just displays your current location within the site's hierarchy. For example, if you're on a blog page, it might just say: Home > Blog > Category > Post name.
Next.
#2. Attribute-based breadcrumbs
Then there are attribute-based breadcrumbs, which are handy for filtering or narrowing down search results.
Let's say you're shopping for shoes online and you've filtered by brand, color, and size. The breadcrumb could show those attributes like: Shoes > Nike > Red > Size 9. This is super useful for complex e-commerce sites!
#3. History-based breadcrumbs
The most common type is probably the path-based breadcrumb trail. This one shows you the exact path you took to get to the current page.
So if you went from the homepage to a category page, and then to a product page, the breadcrumb would look something like: Home > Category > Product.
Awesome.
Some websites also use a hybrid approach, combining elements from different breadcrumb styles to create something unique to their site's needs.
So, it’s up to you!
Now that we've covered the different varieties of breadcrumb navigation, let’s look at tips and examples of breadcrumb navigation.
Breadcrumb Navigation Tips For Website Designing
1. Use Breadcrumbs to Support Primary Navigation and only When Relevant
Here is the secret, only use breadcrumbs to support primary navigation if your site needs them.
If your site is small and simple, breadcrumbs might be like extra sprinkles on a cupcake—nice, but not essential.
But for bigger sites with lots of pages and folders, breadcrumbs become more like a compass, helping users find their way around.
Again, breadcrumb trails have a linear structure, deciding whether to use them depends on how you have designed the website hierarchy or categories.
That’s because of the hierarchy or classification, it will be difficult to create breadcrumbs for your website.
Again, if your website is a one-pager, creating breadcrumbs can confuse users, making them ineffective.
The other best practice when adding your breadcrumbs is to make them smaller and place them somewhere below your site's main navigation rather than making them too large which could confuse you.
You also don't want a breadcrumb trail that stretches all the way across the page! Just show the important sections that lead to the current page.
2. Use Separators Between Individual Levels
The other thing that you should be aware of when adding breadcrumbs to your site is the kind of separators to be used.
There are four commonly accepted and most recognizable symbols for separating hyperlinks in breadcrumbs;
- The “greater than” symbol (>).
- Arrows pointing to the right
- Right angle quotation marks (») and
- Slashes (/).
Ultimately, the choice is yours, but the most important thing is to make sure they convey the relationship between the trailed pages.
#3. Progress from highest level to lowest
When adding breadcrumbs, start broad and get specific.
Think of it like going down a hallway – first, you see the big "Living Room" sign, then maybe a smaller one for "Bookshelf."
Breadcrumbs should follow a similar path, showing the user how they got from the homepage to the specific page they're on.
Again, your breadcrumb navigation should read left to right, with the leftmost link being your homepage, and the rightmost link being the user's current page.
#4. Keep your breadcrumb titles consistent with your page titles
Another important tip to consider is to have your page and breadcrumb titles consistent throughout the site.
This will help you avoid confusion and give you another spot to place your target keywords and this is helpful especially if it gets featured by Google in the search results.
#5. Regularly check your links work properly
As a general rule of thumb, always ensure that your breadcrumb trail is working properly by regularly checking the internal links.
A broken internal link is not only bad for SEO but harmful to your user experience which can increase the bounce rates.
#6. Don’t include a link to the current page
Adding a link to the current page where the visitor is at the moment will cause more confusion when they want to navigate back to the homepage.
That’s because clicking on the link will just load and return to the same page, instead make it bold.
However, as for the other breadcrumb trails, add links to them so that they can easily take the user back.
#7. Use plain, understandable language
Just like any content on your website, it’s important to make your breadcrumbs use plain, simple-to-understand language and avoid technical jargon.
#8. Test your breadcrumb navigation
Just before you launch your site or breadcrumb to the public, always ensure that you have thoroughly tested the navigation with your team. This is important in identifying potential issues that would hurt the navigation of your audience.
If your breadcrumb trails seem to have an issue, try to run troubleshooting to check if your code has inserted the breadcrumb function in the correct place within your theme files.
Now that you know the importance of breadcrumbs and how to use them in your site to enhance navigation, let’s look at how to add them to your site.
How to Add Breadcrumbs to WordPress Websites
WordPress is a common content management system, so we’ll use it to illustrate the process of adding breadcrumbs to your site.
Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins to add breadcrumbs to your site on WordPress. All you need to do is to install the plugin at the backend of your website and it will add all the necessary structures.
After installing and activating Yoast, you'll need to enable breadcrumbs in the settings and configure how they appear.
How To Edit Theme Files (for developers) To Add Breadcrumbs
If your site is not on WordPress, then it will necessitate you to add the breadcrumb code manually.
This method gives you more control over the look and feel of your breadcrumbs, but it requires some coding knowledge.
Here's a general outline:
- Find the theme file that controls your header or navigation.
- Add code to display the breadcrumbs. This code will typically use PHP to determine the user's location on the website and display the appropriate breadcrumbs.
- You can find plugins or code snippets online to help you with this process.
Not yet, this approach can be tricky, so here are some additional things to keep in mind:
- Be careful editing theme files. A small mistake could break your website. If you're not comfortable with coding, it's best to use a plugin.
- There are other breadcrumb plugins available. Yoast SEO is just one option, what we gave you above is just an example for illustration, the ultimate decision lies on you.
Awesome.
Final Thoughts
Up to this point, we’ve discussed the role of breadcrumbs in the website navigation and we found out they’re helpful in:
Improving the user experience for your site
Can improve your SEO, and
Can help you in lead generation which is important for your site
So if you haven’t considered adding breadcrumbs to your site, can you do it today, after reading this guide?
All the best!
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