Last Updated on by Azib Yaqoob
Wondering what is a breadcrumb and how to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress website? Breadcrumbs help users to understand where currently they are browsing on your website. Users can navigate a website better with the use of breadcrumbs especially if a website has numerous pages. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how easily you can add breadcrumbs to a WordPress website.
Some years ago, it was a long and difficult process to add breadcrumbs. A user had to add an HTML tag on each page individually. But WordPress now offers an easy process to add breadcrumbs. Depending on the fact that how much you want your breadcrumbs to be customized, WordPress offers different methods of adding breadcrumbs to a site.
What is Breadcrumb?
Simply put, breadcrumbs help users navigate and understand website link hierarchy.
In other words, the main purpose of breadcrumbs is to provide users a way to easily navigate through your website. It also helps search engines in understanding the hierarchy of the pages.
Why Breadcrumbs are Important for SEO?
Google and other search engines can show these breadcrumbs as a rich result in the SERP. However, you may have to add structured data markup for breadcrumbs, so search engines can understand these breadcrumbs and display them.
Here are some of the advantages to improve your SEO by using breadcrumbs:
- Breadcrumbs link certain keywords of different web pages and help search engines to see how one page is related to another on a site.
- When you use them in the hierarchy, it helps you in improving your SEO for the category pages as well as the innermost pages of your website.
- Breadcrumbs also help in improving the internal linking and website structure.
- Adding breadcrumbs can help you in reducing your bounce rate. If a visitor does not find what he is looking for, breadcrumbs can show them an alternative path to other categories of your website.
How to Add Breadcrumbs to a WordPress Website?
It is quite easy to add breadcrumbs to a WordPress website. However, it is important that your theme should support breadcrumbs navigation. Else you might have to adjust the code to display breadcrumbs on a WordPress website.
We will be using 2 different plugins to add breadcrumbs.
Note: Before applying technical changes on your site, I would highly recommend to backup your website.
Use Yoast SEO Breadcrumbs
If you are using WordPress, then I am pretty sure you must have heard of this plugin ‘Yoast SEO’. It is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins to improve the website’s search performance. You can also use it to add breadcrumbs. Here’s how to properly configure breadcrumbs using Yoast SEO.
First of all, you need to access your website using FTP. The usual area to add breadcrumbs is before or after the page/post title, which you can locate in one of these theme files; page.php, single.php, or header.php. It depends on your WordPress theme structure where this information is located. You need to add this piece of code:
[php]<?php
if ( function_exists(‘yoast_breadcrumb’) ) {
yoast_breadcrumb(‘
<p id=”breadcrumbs”>’,'</p>
‘);
}
?>
[/php]
After that, find the Yoast SEO menu in the right sidebar and go to SEO > Search Appearance > Breadcrumbs and enable the breadcrumbs.
Use Breadcrumb NavXT
It is a standalone breadcrumb plugin that is widely used due to the fact it is quite easy to customize and there are many options to enhance the style of breadcrumbs. I personally use this plugin on my website.
Install Breadcrumb NavXT plugin from the WordPress plugins directory. Activate this plugin.
To display breadcrumbs properly on your site, you need to place a piece of code in the header.php file:
[php]
<div class=”breadcrumbs” typeof=”BreadcrumbList” vocab=”https://schema.org/”>
<?php if(function_exists(‘bcn_display’))
{
bcn_display();
}?>
</div>
[/php]
Note: Some themes have different theme structure, so you may have to contact your theme developer and ask where to place breadcrumbs.
Now you should have breadcrumbs on your WordPress site. To configure this plugin setting, go to settings > Breadcrumb NavXT.
I hope you find this post useful. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. If you are looking to boost your WordPress website’s SEO then check out my WordPress SEO guide for beginners.
