What Are Breadcrumbs in Web Design and Why Your Site Needs Them

User experience reigns supreme in website design, and breadcrumbs are a soft spot. Like in the classic fairy tale, these aides assist the user in navigating through the pages by linking them to the respective pages and providing a clear breadcrumb path of the site structure.

‘Breadcrumbs’ are not just visually appealing. They help streamline navigation, reduce page backtracking, and enhance SEO as they map your site’s content.

From detailed blogs to vast e-commerce sites, breadcrumbs ensure website visitors enjoy their browsing experience without interruptions or collisions. Focusing on this minor feature can significantly enhance user engagement because the impact is more than ‘just crumbs.’

What Are Breadcrumbs?

Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation tool meant to improve user experience by indicating the user’s current location within an application or website’s hierarchy. The term comes from the classic fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, where breadcrumbs were used as a path that could be retraced to aid in navigating backward or upwards within a website’s digital structures.

Breadcrumb trail displays show the user's path from the homepage to the current page, ensuring no steps are missed in the navigation experience.

Source: yoast.com

Breadcrumbs are located near the top of the page as a horizontal list. They consist of clickable links divided by some characters — often arrows (>). They represent the path from the site’s starting homepage to the user’s current location. Breadcrumbs simplify navigation and reduce user friction by allowing higher-level pages to be accessed quickly without using the back button.

Breadcrumbs gained popularity when Microsoft added them to file navigation in Windows Vista. Now, they’re seen as one of the most critical UI/UX design components. Apart from aiding the user, breadcrumbs are also helpful in search engine optimization as they reinforce the site’s structure for the search engine itself and for the content to be crawled.

In brief, breadcrumbs serve as a navigational aid or a structural contour, logically, flexibly, and simply looking after the user’s needs.

Why Do Your Visitors Need Breadcrumb Navigation?

Enhancing User Experience Through Intuitive Navigation

Knowing where you are is crucial for every website visitor. Breadcrumb trails identify the user’s position in the site’s structure and work as a guide. Placing the navigational trail in a linear order clears out any potential confusion that might arise. This feature benefits people who visit a webpage through deep links because they can use it to navigate upwards without going back.

Driving Business Performance and Engagement

Introducing breadcrumb navigation can positively influence business performance and analytics. Many e-commerce sites notice a noticeable decrease in bounce rates after implementing breadcrumbs, as they make it easier for users to navigate back to previous pages, encouraging longer visits and better overall engagement.

These navigation elements help increase the time spent on a particular session and improve page depth volatility by exploring new content categories. The overall user engagement improves while decreasing the bounce rate increases, which is positive for business.

Ensuring Accessibility and Inclusive Design

Breadcrumbs provide critical accessibility benefits as a WCAG 2.1 AA-compliant navigation solution by leveraging a well-defined website hierarchy. In this context, screen reader users can follow a linear path through content while receiving the same directional cues. This design meets the expectation of keyboard navigation and helps people with cognitive disabilities by providing orientation in complicated websites.

Supporting Conversion Optimization Strategies

Breadcrumb navigation has been found to facilitate user journeys in websites focusing on conversion. History based breadcrumbs help users backtrack to previous pages easily, enhancing the overall user experience.

The system reduces navigation steps between category levels while retaining contextual awareness during multi-step processes. This feature is particularly helpful for e-commerce platforms, as it allows shoppers to return to product categories or department pages without losing their place in the browsing sequence.

Implementing Best Practices for Maximum Impact

Petabytes of tools for professional deployment of breadcrumb navigation require the application of information architecture, which is a science in itself. Breadcrumbs should not replace the primary navigation menu, which is essential for straightforward site navigation and should be more prominent than breadcrumbs. Practical implementations utilize clear and concise labels and mimic the site’s content hierarchy.

Integration of design should not clash with primary navigation systems. However, it should be visual with the complete interface. Technical implementations must ensure proper structured data markup for maximum SEO benefits.

Industry Validation and Measurable Results

Breadcrumb navigation was developed and is best served with tools by Baymard Institute Google Search Central, and Moz has shown in their research how breadcrumbs help users understand a site's hierarchy.

The data significantly enhanced usability metrics, search performance, and conversion rates. For organizations that advocate design-optimized data-driven, breadcrumb navigation is still one of the core components of modern web architecture that provides roi.

These tools’ relevancy is becoming more obvious. With the aid of granular, complex algorithms, breadcrumb navigation has shifted from a convenience feature to a critical form of professional web design.

Types of Breadcrumbs in Web Design

Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs

These breadcrumbs are meant to assist users in determining their current location in the website's hierarchy and in navigating to higher-level category pages. This type provides contextual information while allowing exploration of related sections.

Source: bestbuy.com

Path-Based Breadcrumbs

Similarly to browser back buttons, a path based breadcrumb displays a user’s actual path through a website. These are especially useful for users reaching a product page through several filters. Instead of resetting everything, path-based breadcrumbs enable users to return to filtered results and keep their settings.

Source: blog.hubspot.com

Attribute-Based Breadcrumbs

These are primarily used in e-commerce, where attribute-based breadcrumbs show the filters or characteristics of a particular page, such as the size or color of products that customers have already selected. It allows customers to easily view and modify their current selections while navigating through the category pages or search results pages.

Source: shopgap.com

How to Add Breadcrumbs to Your Website

Integrating breadcrumbs into your website is a great way to improve browsing and overall user experience. This usually requires some design work, development, and SEO planning, including the integration of the home page in the breadcrumb trail.

To begin with, define the type of breadcrumb navigation that best fits your site structure, whether it is location-based (showing the hierarchy), path-based (chronological depiction of the user’s journey), or attribute-based (showing selected filters).

With proper markup integration with CSS styling for WordPress users, breadcrumbs can be easily placed into templates at the top of the page, under the main page navigation.

For improved visibility and ranking in other search engines, ensure that your breadcrumbs are using schema (structured data) breadcrumbs. This is done automatically or customarily using SEO plugins.

Lastly, verify how the breadcrumbs look and function on different devices and screen sizes to ensure seamless user navigation through your site.

How Do Breadcrumbs Help in Improving SEO?

Breadcrumbs enhance the user experience and improve your website’s SEO, so they should always be integrated. Breadcrumbs provide a clear layout of how your pages are organized, aiding Google and other search engines in comprehending and indexing your content. As a result, your website should expect an increase in web crawlers and search engine visibility.

Source: marketinglad.io

When used with structured data (schema breadcrumbs), breadcrumbs can function as navigation points within the search listings, giving your results a clean, informative look. This, however, increases your website’s click-through rates since users are more willing to trust and interact with well-organized search snippets.

Also, breadcrumbs reduce the bounce rate. Your content becomes more valuable and engaging. Users will spend more time exploring other sections of your website, which sends positive signals to the search engine. All in all, breadcrumb navigation improves content usability and discoverability — two nimble elements that are vital in a strong SEO plan. This will enable a company to gain a structural advantage in any industry.

Breadcrumb Navigation Best Practices

Following a couple of best practices is paramount to enhancing user experience with breadcrumb navigation. Although navigation is one of the simplest website elements, these best practices will profoundly improve clarity, usability, and optimization.

• Show the Complete Path: Breadcrumb trail displays must accurately and thoroughly demonstrate the user’s navigation path to the current page from the homepage. Avoid skipping levels, as users should be able to see and retrace each step.
• Begin with the Homepage: Visit the homepage first. This provides a reliable starting point for users and helps increase navigation within your site.
• Use Familiar Separators: The well-known ‘greater than’ symbol ( > ) should be used to separate links. It is informative and neat, and it indicates a good hierarchy. Other symbols, such as arrows (→) or colons (:), can be used, but remember to prioritize clarity.
• Place Breadcrumbs at the Top: Breadcrumbs should be on the top of the page, below the navigation bar, and directly above the content title. They act as auxiliary navigation tools.

Source: columbia.com

• Make Them Easy to See: Because breadcrumbs are often overlooked, use contrasting colors to enhance visibility. Minimal space does not lessen the importance of visibility in usability.
• Bold the Current Page: Bold the last word segment of the breadcrumb to clarify the user’s positioning. Bold text (and no hyperlink) accentuates the current page whilst avoiding confusion.
• Don’t Link the Final Item: The last breadcrumb describes what page the user is on. If forming a link is done because it’s customary practice, then it becomes superfluous. Why make things more complicated than they need to be? Simplistic and direct answers are the most useful.
• Skip Breadcrumbs on the Homepage: Breadcrumbs assist in navigation from any page to the homepage, not vice versa. Only breadcrumbs on the homepage serve no purpose other than adding visual disorder to an otherwise clean interface.
• Use Clear, Full Page Titles: Use clear and descriptive titles for your breadcrumbs so users will not be uncertain about all the links. If there is not ample space, ellipses can be used to truncate, but ‘you are here’ is vague and unnecessary.
• Match the URL Structure: These breadcrumbs should follow the same hierarchy as the site’s available URL. Following a system helps users become more acquainted with the presented structure and reduces confusion due to differing navigation cues.

Following these best practices in breadcrumbs will make navigation easier, increase engagement, and streamline your website and user experience for smoother navigation journeys. It’s a minor feature that can lead to huge advantages.

3 Best Examples of Breadcrumb Navigation

Serena & Lily

In our redesign of Serena & Lily’s e-commerce platform, we focused on enhancing user navigation and overall experience. While the case study highlights improvements such as immersive product feeds and streamlined customization options, it does not specifically mention the implementation of breadcrumb navigation.

Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation aid that displays a user’s location within a website’s hierarchy, allowing for easy backtracking and improved site structure comprehension. Although not detailed in this particular case, incorporating a breadcrumb path can further enhance user experience by providing clear pathways through complex site architectures.

Penn Foster

In this case, we can examine the hierarchy breadcrumb navigation example on the website of the for-profit online college Penn Foster. The breadcrumb trail displays users exactly where they are within the site’s structure and helps them quickly return to higher category pages without using the browser’s back button.

Source: vwo.com

Brooklinen

Brooklinen, a brand that specializes in home essentials, has a unique breadcrumbs navigation strategy on product pages that is both clean and effective. While the homepage seen in the image doesn’t have breadcrumbs, whenever users start navigating through categories like “Bed” or “Bath,” they are led through well-structured, hierarchy-based breadcrumbs.

Source: brooklinen.com

Read more:

• How Much Does It Cost to Redesign a Website?
• The Power of Words: How Quality Website Content Drives Results
• Website Header Design: Creating a Stunning First Impression

Conclusion

To sum up, design elements may seem trivial, but in this case, breadcrumbs do not fall flat when it comes to affecting user experience. Providing users with a clear path of navigation and breadcrumbs reduces friction. It improves usability while making the website feel more intuitive, especially for content-rich or e-commerce websites.