Breadcrumb is widely used for web design and it is helpful for webmasters to offer an excellent experience to visitors. However, there are still many people having mo idea about its real role. Therefore, in the article below, we introduced it in detail and we will also teach webmasters how to add and use it in WordPress step-by-step.
Breadcrumbs & Its Benefits
Breadcrumb is a professional term and it is also called breadcrumb trail. It is a useful tool to offer navigation help if you want to track your locations when you surf on a website. To be specific, you are able to know where you are and you can quickly find the right page that you want to get to.
If you are visiting a website that has a hierarchical site structure, with breadcrumbs you can see all the categories and parent pages of the page that you locate. Actually, displayed as navigation menus, breadcrumbs are presented by their link structures. They direct website visitors to get to the specific page within a short time.
It is not hard for us to know that breadcrumbs benefit user experience very much. Besides, as what we mentioned above, breadcrumbs lead to a clear and well-organized internal link structure, such as “Homepage >> Category >>Single page”,so it can help Google bots crawl websites to get the accurate results.
Moreover, using breadcrumbs, Google will show your sites in the format of breadcrumbs, instead of a single URL. In this way, it can help your visitors notice your websites and know the related content. For example, Google will show your websites to your visitors in the format below. In this format,visitors can get some details about you websites.
Tips on How to Add and Use Breadcrumbs in WordPress.
There are 2 ways to add and use breadcrumbs in WordPress. On one hand, you can complete the handle manually. On the other hand, to be easier, you can accomplish it by using plugins.
In fact, there are many plugins in WordPress helping you add the breadcrumbs with little effort. Here we recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast. This plugin is powerful to offer breadcrumbs functionality and it has 15 million downloads. Now, we will give a detailed introduction on how to add and use breadcrumbs by using WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Install and activate the plugin. Then find out it among the plugins in the list and click “Settings”.
Then you need to do some changes with “Internal link”.
Move to the setting page and you need to configure breadcrumbs now. Pay attention to “Enable Breadcrumbs” and check the box. Then you can fill the blanks as you like and remember to click “Save Changes” at last.
Next, it is the time to insert PHP code into your theme. The plugin has offered you a line of code on the bottom of the setting page.Bedsides, it is necessary for you to insert the code into the right places because the breadcrumbs appear on the places where you insert the code. Here we will introduce tips on adding breadcrumbs on pages.
At first, find out page.php file and edit it, you can do this in two ways, one way is using FTP client and another way is that you need to search in this order: Appearance>>Editor and then open “Page Template” link. Besides, you’d better back up the file before you do some changes in case of there will be some troubles.
Now, add the code offered on the setting page into the right place. In this way, your theme will display your breadcrumbs.
After changing the theme file, you can offer your visitors a quick search with the navigation links in the format below.
In addition, if you still feel it is not quick as it should be, you can add the code into other places or try other plugins. In addition, it is necessary for you to find the most suitable way to add and use breadcrumbs, especially in the case that you own a large-size website and you want to offer an excellent user experience.
