Almost every Good Website has Breadcrumbs. These smaller navigation aids do not just tell people where they are on your Website, but they help in the Work of Google on how your site is structured. This is adding these little helpful pointers makes so much sense. Let’s now take look at how to navigate work with breadcrumbs.
What are Breadcrumbs?
A small text path called breadcrumb is often located at the page top, which indicates where the users are on the website.
On Yoast SEO you can do this by the path to our Yoast SEO plugin page Home > WordPress Plugins > Yoast SEO for WordPress. This trail of breadcrumbs shows where are you. Every step of that path is scorable, returning to the homepage.
When Gretel and Hansel went into the woods, Hansel dropped pieces of bread into the ground so that they could find their way home if they got lost. These eventually became the model for the ones we see on the websites. This is why breadcrumb is important for the website.
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They are also present in the Google Search Results, and you take benefit of this if you add the correct form of structured data to your site or if you use Yoast SEO. With the help of breadcrumbs in search results you can give users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page sits on your Website.
Yoast SEO adds automatically important structured data -a BreadcrumbList — in JSON-LD format for you. You will see the relevant lines which appear in your source code when you flip the switch in the settings – it depends although, on your theme, you may need a small piece of code to your theme. You can find more about our breadcrumb structured data in our documentation. You can use the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block to add quickly to individual pages or posts.
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Different Types of Breadcrumbs
You may have seen that there are different types of breadcrumbs. These are the 3 most common ones:
Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs
It’s how we use breadcrumbs on our Website and these are the most common ones. They tell you how many steps there are to get back to the homepage and where you are in a site structure.
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Attribute-based BreadCrumbs
A user has searched on an e-commerce Website. The trail of breadcrumbs comprises product attributes – for instance, Home > Product category > Gender > Size > Color.
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History-based breadcrumbs
History-based breadcrumbs do exactly what they see on the tin: they are ordered according to what you have done on the Website. Think of this as an alternative to your history bar, so you will get something like this: Home > Previous page > Previous page > Previous page > Current page.
It’s also possible to mix these as Macy’s does in the below screenshot.
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Advantages of Using Breadcrumbs
There are so many benefits to using these little helpful pointers on your Website. Let’s take a quick look at them:
- Google Loves Them
Google too likes your breadcrumbs just like visitors. They provide Google one more way to figure out how your site is structured, but, as covered earlier, Google may use also them in the actual search results, which makes your results much more enticing to the users.
To maximize the chances of your breadcrumbs appearing in Google, you need to add structured data as Yoast SEO does.
- They enhance the user experience
People often look around in search of recognizable landmarks or objects. People hate being lost. When confronted with a new location – the same true is for websites. You needed to keep visitors happy and decrease the friction as much as possible. With the help of Breadcrumbs, you increase UE (User Experience) since they have a similar interface element that shows instantly people a way out. There is no need to click the back button!
- They lower bounce rates
It’s all about organic search. Anyone enters hardly a site via the homepage. This means any part of the website could be a point of entry. You should make a way to guide these visitors to other parts of your website if the page selected doesn’t meet their needs. You are offering visitors different ways to browse your Website. Don’t you think sending visitors to your homepage is better than going back to Google?
How to Add Breadcrumbs
There are so many ways of adding breadcrumbs to your Website. In the first step, if you use WordPress, you can use Yoast SEO or many other plugins. The process will be different if you use different CMS, the process will be different. It is also possible to add them to your code by hand. You need to use structured data in a way that Google Understands if you wanted also appear in Google results. You can get more details on google’s developer documentation on breadcrumbs.
Yoast SEO has breadcrumb support built-in
With the help of Yoast SEO, you can easily add breadcrumbs to your WordPress Website. It will automatically add everything important to get them ready for your Website, just not Google. Some themes come with Yoast SEO support baked in. You only have to turn on breadcrumbs and set them up in the way you like. In case your theme doesn’t support our breadcrumbs yet, you needed to add the following code to your theme where want them to appear:
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This code is often placed inside the page.php or single.php files, just above the title of the page. It’s not a good idea to have some themes at the end of the header.php since this could cause problems.
You can go to the advanced setting of Yoast SEO after adding the code and support breadcrumb or setting of Yoast SEO. You can also control how the structure will look and what prefixes will be used. Find out more in our document on implementing breadcrumbs with Yoast SEO.
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Breadcrumbs with a WordPress Block
You can simply use the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block to add breadcrumbs to individual pages or posts if you use the block editor. If you don’t want to touch code or if you only wanted to add to a specific page. You can easily add Breadcrumbs – hit simply the big icon to add a block. Then, find the Yoast SEO breadcrumbs block by entering the name in the search bar or scrolling down to the Yoast Section. You can type simply yoast breadcrumbs in an empty paragraph alternatively.
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Conclusion
Habsel and Gretek are still lost in the woods despite using breadcrumbs. Don’t let this happen to your visitors! With the help of breadcrumbs, you can get an easy-to-grasp way for visitors to navigate your site, and they understand instantly how your site structure works. Google loves them for the same reason. So always use Yoast SEO to add them to your site easily.
