Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the small trail of links near the top of a page showing where that page sits within the site. They are read from left to right, they climb from the home page down to where the visitor is standing, and they exist because most people do not arrive at a website through its front door.

In short

• They show a page’s position in the structure of the site.
• They matter because most visitors land in the middle, not at the top.
• The last item is the current page and should not be a link.
• Marked up properly they change how the address looks in search results.

What the trail is saying

A breadcrumb trail is a series of links, each one a level above the last, ending with the page currently open. A shop selling office furniture might show a path from the home page through a furniture category to chairs to the specific chair being viewed.

The trail describes structure, not history. It answers where am I rather than how did I get here. This distinction sounds academic and decides how the thing is built, because a trail that reflects the route each visitor happened to take is different for every person and cannot be relied on.

Structure here means the structure a visitor can perceive. It does not have to match your folder layout, your menu or the way your business is organised internally. It has to match the way somebody browsing would expect the site to be divided, which is a question of information architecture rather than of technology.

Why they exist at all

Almost nobody starts at your home page. They arrive from a search result, a link in a message, an advert or a social post, and they land on a page somewhere in the middle of your site with no idea what surrounds it.

That visitor has two useful next moves and a menu only offers one of them. The menu lets them start again from the top. The trail lets them step sideways into the category that contains what they were already looking at, which is usually closer to what they wanted.

This matters most on the pages where a visitor is close to deciding. Somebody on a product page who wants a different size, a different colour or simply something similar can climb one level and find it. Without the trail they either use the menu and start over or they leave, and the second option costs a sale that had almost been made.

What they do in search results

A search listing normally shows the address of the page. Where breadcrumb markup is present, that raw path can be replaced by a readable trail, so a result shows a route through the site instead of a string of slashes and words.

That is the visible change and it is a modest one. The less visible change is that a search engine is given an explicit statement of how your pages relate to each other, which is one of the things structured data exists to provide. It does not move a page up the results. It makes the relationships between pages legible without anybody having to infer them from links alone.

Two rules keep this honest. The markup has to describe the trail that is actually visible on the page, and every step in it has to point at a page that exists.

Where they help and where they do not

Breadcrumbs earn their place on sites with depth. A shop with categories, a service business with a page for each service and each area, a site with a library of articles filed by topic. Anywhere a page can sit two or three levels below the front, a visitor landing on it benefits from being told so.

They are wasted on a flat site of a handful of pages, where nothing is deep enough for anybody to lose their bearings. On such a site a breadcrumb trail is decoration that says home and then the page name, which no visitor needed.

Three faults are common enough to check for.

• A trail that does not match the menu. Two contradictory accounts of how the site is organised, which is worse than one.
• A trail built from the browsing history. Different for every visitor, and duplicating a function the back button already performs.
• The current page as a link. A link to the page somebody is already reading, which is at best noise.

Shops, filters and the trail that cannot decide

The hardest place to build a sensible trail is a shop where the same product sits in several places at once. A chair can belong to office furniture, to seating and to a sale, and a visitor can arrive at it through any of them.

There are two workable answers and one that causes trouble.

The first is to choose one home for each product and use it consistently. The trail is then the same for everybody, it matches the markup, and it is predictable. This is the version most shops should build.

The second is to reflect the route taken, so a visitor who came through the sale sees the sale in the trail. It reads more naturally to that person and it means the visible trail differs between visitors, so the structured data has to describe the canonical path rather than whatever was shown.

The one that causes trouble is putting filters into the trail. A path recording that somebody selected a colour and a price band produces an unbounded number of trails, none of which describes a place in the site, and it gives search engines a great many addresses that lead to the same handful of products. Filters belong in the interface, not in the structure.

Words you will hear

• Breadcrumb trail. The full path shown, from the top level to the current page.
• BreadcrumbList. The structured data type describing that path to a search engine.
• Parent page. The level directly above the current one.
• Depth. How many levels down from the home page a page sits.
• Wayfinding. The general term for helping somebody understand where they are and what is nearby.

Breadcrumbs are cheap to add and easy to get almost right. Build them from the structure of the site rather than from the visitor’s route, keep them consistent with the menu and with the internal links in your content, and mark them up so the result in search reads as a path rather than as an address.