You might have heard about the term “breadcrumbs.”
It’s an essential part of website navigation, and it’s an integral part of SEO as well.
But do you know what exactly is Breadcrumbs, how does it work and how you can use it on your website?
If not, this post is for you.
In this post, we’ll show you, what are breadcrumbs, why it’s important, and how you can add them to your website.
So take your seat, and let’s right get into the post.
What Are Breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are link paths that are located at the top of the page. It helps the user in navigating and tells them how far they’ve come beyond the home page.
Here’s an example of breadcrumb:
Breadcrumbs are clickable links, so one can click on those links and go back to any previous pages easily.
It will exactly show you the path you took to reach that certain page. It shows the home page, the category where the page is located, and the current page.
Why Should You Use Breadcrumb on Your Website?
Now that you know what breadcrumbs are, you might wonder: why is it important?
It’s not just important for a single thing, but it helps in many different ways.
Here are a few advantages of using breadcrumbs on your site:
1. It Helps in Website Navigation
The biggest benefit of using breadcrumbs is that it helps in website navigation.
The better your website navigation will be, the better user-friendly your website will be.
In short:
Having breadcrumbs will improve the user experience of your website by a huge margin.
Using this, you can go back and forth on the site and easily access the category or the homepage.
It makes it easier for users to navigate the site and gives them a wonderful web surfing experience.
2. Improve SEO Performance
As user experience has become an integral part of SEO now, if you improve the UX of your site, it will automatically enhance the SEO performance.
Apart from that, it also helps search engine crawlers to navigate the website and help them to understand the page and its relevancy.
According to Google, they use breadcrumbs to indicate the page’s position in the website’s hierarchy and help to categorize and contextualize the page.
If you look closely, even Google highlights breadcrumbs in the search result.
3. Improve Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave the website without visiting any other page.
Having a higher bounce rate indicates that you have some issues with the page. It might be slow loading speed or bad content.
But why is bounce rate important?
It’s because of SEO.
Bounce rate might not be a direct ranking factor for Google, but it does impact the search performance indirectly.
If people are bouncing off your site, that means people might not be happy with the content and might affect your search performance negatively.
If you have breadcrumbs on your site, you’re giving your audience a chance to stay on your site and browse other pages.
And this will decrease your bounce rate by a considerable margin.
Different Types of Breadcrumbs
There are different types of breadcrumbs created for different purposes.
Every breadcrumb serves a different purpose and is used differently.
Let’s have a look at each of these one by one.
1. Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs
This is the most common type of breadcrumbs used all over the internet.
This breadcrumb shows you the site structure, and the path followed to reach that particular page.
Here’s an example of a Hierarchy-based breadcrumb:
Home > Blog > Category > page.
2. History-Based Breadcrumbs
History-based Breadcrumbs show the path you’ve taken and the pages you’ve visited before you reached that page.
It’s similar to what you can see in your web browser history section.
This won’t be similar for everyone as users might browse the website differently to reach that particular page.
However, it can be a really beneficial tool to improve your user experience, and the users can go back to any previous pages easily.
Here’s an example of a History-based breadcrumb:
Home > Blog > Page 1 > page 2> page 3.
3. Attribute-Based Breadcrumbs
Attribute-based breadcrumbs are used to show different attributes of any product and to make it easier for the user to navigate.
This is the most commonly used breadcrumb in e-Commerce websites.
Here’s an example of Attribute-Based breadcrumb:
Home > Category > Product > Age > Gender > Size.
How to Add Breadcrumbs to Your Website
There are plenty of ways of adding breadcrumbs to any website.
If you’re WordPress, you can easily add breadcrumb with the help of plugins.
However, if you have a custom-made website or using any other CMS platform, you might have to do it manually.
Most CMS platforms do provide a built-in breadcrumb option, so most probably, you won’t have to face any issues.
But if you’re a WordPress user, you can add breadcrumb by using three plugins:
- Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress that lets you do multiple SEO tasks effortlessly. Using this plugin, you can easily enable breadcrumbs on your site with a click of a button, and you can also edit it according to your preference. However, you do have to insert a code in the “.php” folder of your theme file to visibly show the breadcrumbs on your website.
- Rank Math: Rank Math is another great SEO plugin for WordPress and an alternative to Yoast SEO. Using this plugin as well, you can add breadcrumbs to your site pretty quickly. The process is almost similar to Yoast SEO.
- WooCommerce Breadcrumbs: If you’re running a WooCommerce store, you can use the WooCommerce breadcrumbs plugin. This plugin will allow you to modify the built-in breadcrumbs that WooCommerce generates.
And as mentioned earlier, if you have a custom-built website, you would have to ask your developer to add breadcrumbs.
Conclusion
Breadcrumbs are an essential part of good website navigation and user experience.
And not only that, but breadcrumbs also help in better search performance as it helps Google to navigate through your website easily and find the context of the page.
Even Google themselves recommends using Breadcrumbs on every website.
In short:
No matter whether you have a blog or you’re running an eCommerce store, you should have breadcrumbs installed on your site.
We hope now you know what breadcrumb is, what are the benefits of using it, and how you can add it to your site.
