Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs, sometimes called a breadcrumb trail, are the small line of navigation that usually appears at the top of a page. They show where you are within a website's structure, for example: Home > Bathroom > Showers > Walk-in showers. Each part is a link, so you can go up a level with a single click.

The name comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, who scattered breadcrumbs to find their way back. On a website it works the same way: visitors get lost less often, and search engines get a clear picture of how your pages fit together.

Breadcrumbs are especially useful on websites with several levels, such as online stores, knowledge bases or sites with lots of services. On a small five-page website, they add little. The deeper and more extensive your structure, the more they help.

What types of breadcrumbs are there?

• Hierarchical breadcrumbs show a page's place in your site structure. This is the most common form.
• Attribute-based breadcrumbs show selected filters, such as brand, colour or size in an online store.
• Path-based breadcrumbs show which pages the visitor has visited. These are rarely recommended, because they are different for everyone.

Why breadcrumbs are good for SEO

Breadcrumbs form a series of internal links to the higher levels of your website. That helps search engines with crawling and makes the hierarchy explicit. If you also mark them up with structured data using the BreadcrumbList schema, Google can understand your site structure better. Google has said that from 2025 it no longer shows breadcrumbs in mobile search results, but the markup is still supported and the benefit for your navigation remains.

Context matters for AI search engines too. A clear place within a logical structure helps systems understand that a page about "walk-in showers" is part of a wider range around bathroom renovation.

An example: a bathroom supplies store in Manchester

A bathroom supplies store in Manchester with an online shop of a few thousand products uses a clear category structure. A customer who lands directly on a product page for a rainfall shower via Google sees at the top: Home > Bathroom > Showers > Rainfall showers. With one click, they can see all the alternatives. Without those breadcrumbs, they might have closed their browser.

How to implement breadcrumbs properly

1. First make sure you have a logical URL structure and category layout.
2. Place the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, above the main heading.
3. Use short, clear names that match the titles of the category pages.
4. Don't make the current page clickable; it is only there for orientation.
5. Add BreadcrumbList markup, preferably in JSON-LD, and test it with Google's Rich Results Test.

Don't forget the mobile view either: you can shorten long trails without losing the structure, for example by showing only the parent level. Also test whether the links are easy to tap on a small screen. Want to know whether your breadcrumbs and markup work correctly across your entire website? A technical SEO analysis quickly brings missing or faulty implementations to light.