Breadcrumbs improve the user experience on your site and provide Google with extra information on how your website is structured. That’s why it is an excellent practice to incorporate them on your site. Here’s a quick and actionable guide on what they are and how to use them to enhance your SEO.

What are breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a sequence of links that tell the user where they are within the website or what route they have taken on it. They are usually found at the top of the page and indicate the path from where the user is to the home page.

Types of breadcrumbs

From the definition we have given, we can see that there are different types of breadcrumbs. Let’s see what they are:

Breadcrumbs based on the website hierarchy

These are the breadcrumbs most frequently used. They show where the user is within the site structure and how many steps away he or she is from the home page. This allows them to navigate to category pages easily.

An example of these breadcrumbs would be as follows:

Home> Category> Subcategory> Current Page.

Dynamic or Attribute-based Breadcrumbs

These breadcrumbs usually appear when a user has been searching for an ecommerce. As the name suggests, they are formed dynamically, according to the path the person has taken through the website. This type of breadcrumb shows the page’s position within site or the attributes of the product.

Let’s see an example:

Home> Category> Gender> Color Number.

Breadcrumbs in a drop-down menu or based on history

They are sorted by what the user has done on the site since they entered it. They are most useful on large websites where you want to add some additional items to the path. They work for both dynamic and hierarchy-based breadcrumbs.

They could appear like this:

Home Page> Previous Page> Previous Page> Current Page.

Benefits of using breadcrumbs for SEO

Breadcrumbs take up very little space, and their functionality is excellent. Let’s see the main advantages we get by implementing them:

Google will look at your website with good eyes

The search engine, as well as users, love breadcrumbs because they help to understand the website structure. Google can also use them in its search results, making your pages much more eye-catching.

They help improve the on-page experience

Breadcrumbs guide the user so that they don’t get lost on the website. They show the visitors the exit to the home page so they can go back to it at the very moment they need to, without having to press the “back” button.

They reduce the bounce rate

Almost no one enters a site directly from its home page; visitors usually come from an organic search. Hence, any page can be an entry point.

Therefore, it is necessary to guide visitors so that they can go to other pages of the site if the one they are on does not help them find the information they need. In this sense, breadcrumbs serve to reduce the bounce rate, as they offer users an alternative way to navigate the site.

How to add breadcrumbs in WordPress

You don’t need to have excellent knowledge of WordPress to add breadcrumbs. Here are the two main methods to implement it:

Through the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin

You can install this plugin very easily by following the nest steps:

1- From the WordPress admin screen navigate to Plugins.
2- Search for Breadcrumb NavXT.
3- Once you find it, download it and activate it.
4- Go to the “Appearance” tab, and click on “Widgets.”
5- Drag the NavXT widget to the area of the page where you want it to appear.

Using Yoast SEO

The first thing you have to do is download the Yoast SEO plugin, taking the steps we have seen in the previous section but for this other add-on.

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll need to add a snippet of code to your WordPress child theme. You can add it to any template you are using, but we recommend doing it in page.php, single.php, or header.php. This way, you ensure that the breadcrumbs appear on every page of the website.

The code snippet is as follows:

1. <?php
2. if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
3. yoast_breadcrumb( '<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>' );
4. }
5. ?>

Once you have added the code, you can now enable the breadcrumbs configuration by following the path:

Yoast SEO -> Search Engine Appearance -> Breadcrumbs.




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