Breadcrumb navigation

What it means

Breadcrumb navigation is a row of links showing where a page sits in a site's structure, such as Home, Glossary, Term. The name comes from the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, who marked their path with breadcrumbs.

It helps visitors find their bearings and move up a level with one click, for example from a product page to its category. This improves the user experience, especially on deep structures such as online shops, catalogues or glossaries with many pages.

For search engines, breadcrumbs signal the site hierarchy and form part of internal linking. With structured data using the Schema.org BreadcrumbList type, the path can appear in search results instead of the bare URL.

How it works in practice

The most common type is hierarchy-based breadcrumbs reflecting the category structure. They sit above the page heading, the last item, the current page, is usually not a link, and levels are separated by a symbol such as an arrow or slash.

The structured data must match what the visitor sees on the page. On multilingual sites, level names are translated and links point to the language version the visitor is in, so the path does not send them to another language.

On mobile, a long path is often shortened, for example to a single link one level up, so it does not take up much space. Breadcrumb links should be large enough to tap and accessible to screen readers, with the navigation region labelled.

What to watch out for

Breadcrumbs do not replace the main menu or a good site structure. If the structure is messy and a page belongs to several categories, choose one primary path and use it consistently, or the path will confuse visitors and crawlers alike.

Search engines change how results are displayed, and the path may not always appear, especially on mobile. The value of breadcrumbs for users and internal links remains, however, so they are worth keeping regardless of changes in search results.