What are Breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are a series of labels that show the steps it takes to get to the page you’re on. I’ll show you in detail later on this page, but an example of a basic breadcrumb structure is: Home > parent page > child page.
Have you ever clicked on search results and found yourself on a page but have no idea how to find Home on the site? Or you’d like to explore the site further, but can’t find your way around? With breadcrumbs, you can see exactly where you are.
You can click any part of the breadcrumb trail to go to that page.
Where do I find them?
Websites usually display breadcrumbs at the top of the page, often just underneath the page title. They might be adjacent to the page’s metadata.
Do they help SEO?
Yes, they do! Search engines use breadcrumbs to categorize pages and posts on your website; to understand its hierarchy. They’re important for SEO because the more structure you can offer search engines, the better they’ll understand your site.
When should you use breadcrumbs?
If your website has pages within pages, you’ll definitely want breadcrumbs.
Let’s say you sell ukuleles. Your site structure might include something like we see in this graphic. This site will have a page for each of these products. That equals a lot of pages and we haven’t even started on strings and things!
When we add breadcrumbs to each product page, visitors can peruse and backtrack easily to compare products without worrying about losing their place. So, a breadcrumb from the graphic to the right might be:
Ukuleles > Tenor > Koa > Inlaid
A little further down the page, you can see a real-life example from Kala, a fine uke maker.
If your website has pages within pages, you’ll definitely want breadcrumbs.
Let’s say you sell ukuleles. Your site structure might include something like we see in this graphic. This site will have a page for each of these products. That equals a lot of pages and we haven’t even started on strings and things!
When we add breadcrumbs to each product page, visitors can peruse and backtrack easily to compare products without worrying about losing their place. So, a breadcrumb from the above graphic might be:
Ukuleles > Tenor > Koa > Inlaid
A little further down the page, you can see a real-life example from Kala, a fine uke maker.
Examples of sites that benefit from breadcrumbs
- Blogs that have categorized posts
- A site with a catalog of products
- A university site which has colleges, departments, classes, professors, etc.
- Sites with instructions on how to use a product. See the graphic below of Google’s page on breadcrumbs; they have so many articles that they not only use breadcrumbs, but they also include an index
Real-life samples
How do I add breadcrumbs to my site?
The page builder I use, Elementor, has a widget for adding breadcrumbs to websites, and so does Yoast. If your existing plugins or theme don’t include a widget for it, you may need to download a plugin specifically for this purpose.
Sooo... do I need these things?
If you have a simple site with just a few pages and no hierarchy, they’re not necessary, but if you have multiple layers of pages, products, etc., they’re an important functional part of your website’s SEO strategy.
Interesting Links
- Elementor's widget
- Firefox's Breadcrumb
- Google’s Best Practices for Breadcrumbs
- Google’s Breadcrumb (BreadcrumbList) structured data
- Yoast’s Breadcrumbs
- Yoast’s How to implement Yoast SEO breadcrumbs
- Yoast's What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?
- WordPress’s WordPress Breadcrumbs: How to Display Them on Your Site
