What Is Breadcrumb Navigation, and Does Your Site Need It?

You have seen them even if you never noticed: a short trail near the top of a page that reads something like Home, Services, Roof Repair. That trail is called breadcrumb navigation, named after the breadcrumbs in the old fairy tale that helped someone find the way back.

What breadcrumbs do for visitors

• They show where the visitor is on your site
• They give a one-click way back to a broader page, such as the whole services section
• They cut down on backtracking, especially for people who arrive on a deep page from Google

That last group is bigger than it sounds. Plenty of visitors never see your home page first. They land in the middle of your site and need a quick way to look around.

On a phone, where there is little room for a full menu, a short trail is especially handy. It lets visitors step back one level without opening the menu at all.

How they help with search

Breadcrumbs also help search engines understand how your pages are organized. When the trail is marked up properly, Google can show it in search results in place of a long web address, which makes your listing easier to read. The markup behind this is covered in what schema markup is.

Does your site need them?

Breadcrumbs earn their place on sites with layers: several service categories, a store with product groups, a blog with topics, or a business with pages for different locations. For that last case, see whether you need a page for each location.

A simple site with a handful of pages and a flat menu does not need them. The trail would only repeat what the menu already shows.

How to do them well

• Keep the trail short and use plain words
• Make every step clickable except the current page
• Place it near the top of the page, above the main heading, in a quiet style
• Keep it consistent across the whole site
• On phones, make each link large enough to tap without hitting its neighbor

A trail should support your main menu, not replace it. For menu advice, see how many items belong in your website menu.

There are a few styles of trail, but the simplest and most common follows your site structure, from the home page down to the current page. Unless you have a specific reason, use that one.

Fix the structure first

Breadcrumbs only work if the way your pages are grouped makes sense. A messy structure produces a confusing trail. If some pages are not linked from anywhere, start with what orphan pages are, and tidy the structure before adding the trail.

Once the trail is in place, click through it yourself. Every step should lead to a real, useful page, never to an error.