Breadcrumbs

What is breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs or Breadcrumb navigation is an element of the web page interface that aids visitors to navigate through a website hierarchy. Breadcrumbs display what page you’re at at the moment, and several pages of the higher level (subcategory, category, main).

Types of breadcrumbs

Hierarchy-based breadcrumb. Display the website structure and your current location. It helps to get back to the previous page.

Example: Home → About us → Our team

Attribute-based breadcrumbs. Often used in e-commerce, breadcrumbs display the product categories (or attributes), like size, collection, brand, etc.

Example: Home → Boots → Jogging → Men

History-based breadcrumbs. They show the exact path of your journey — all the pages you’ve visited in order.

Example: Home → Blog → Services → Design → Our team → Contact us

Benefits of using breadcrumbs

They keep visitors on your website longer. Breadcrumbs encourage visitors to easily continue navigating your website or online store by going one step back or returning to the main page instead. Besides, knowing the return path is psychologically comfortable, and visitors click through your website with less stress about missing something important.

Breadcrumbs help Google to rank your website. Google uses breadcrumbs to categorize your content and rank it with the highest possible relevance to the search query. Breadcrumbs help the system to specify what category your content relates to and list on SERP.

They improve user experience. Navigating through your online store, customers never find themselves in the dead-end without any idea how they got here. Breadcrumbs show the structure of your website allowing customers to find what they are looking for.

Breadcrumbs highlight important categories to return to and continue shopping. Usually, online stores use attribute-based breadcrumbs which means the shoppers can jump back to the preferred category with one click and continue looking through the products. It’s convenient and fast.