Breadcrumbs are essential on websites from an SEO and user experience perspective, so it’s best not to remove them.
This is one area of your website where function has to take precedence over form.
We often get asked to remove breadcrumbs from a website because it’s felt, for whatever reason, that they spoil the aesthetic. However, breadcrumbs are not there to look nice; they are there to help your visitors and get noticed by the search engines and are an integral part of UX design.
Breadcrumbs for SEO: what they do and why they matter.
Improved crawling and indexing.
Having breadcrumbs on your website helps the search engine bots to index your site.
They provide a clear, hierarchical structure to help the bots understand the relationship between pages. If you have a WP site with pages, posts, CPTs, categories and tags, that can be a lot of content structure to understand.
Enhanced internal linking.
Breadcrumbs create internal links on your site to higher-level pages, and search engines love internal links.
Adding breadcrumbs helps to distribute internal link equity throughout your site, strengthening your overall SEO structure.
Rich snippets in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Breadcrumbs can appear in the SERPs as rich snippets to boost your site’s results.
This provides clear and relevant information for users and can improve click-through rates on your site (CTR).
David Foreman
Managing Director
Putting your visitor before your design preferences.
It can be tempting to simply not add breadcrumbs to your site as you ‘don’t like how they look’, but they are not for you; they are for your visitors and the search engines.
Not using them can signal to Google (et al.) that your users are not your priority.
Get breadcrumbs on your siteReduced bounce rates.
Adding breadcrumbs to guide users to your top-level content or parent categories can increase dwell time on your site and keep people there longer, reducing bounce rates back to the search engine and improving your overall SEO.
This signals positive engagement from the search engine: your site was a good match for the search term, which can increase your rankings.
Breadcrumbs for your visitors.
We encourage our clients to make user-first decisions about website design, structure and content, and whilst you may think breadcrumbs don’t look great, your users will not thank you for removing them.
Navigation clarity.
Breadcrumbs show users the location of your site and help them understand your content’s hierarchy and structure.
They stop your landing pages from becoming widowed and allow users to navigate easily.
For example, if a visitor lands on a service page on your site, breadcrumbs allow the user to see that the page they are looking at is a child service of a larger offering or part of a range of services you offer.
Home > Services > Service Category > Current Service Page
This single line informs the visitor that you have this service, which is part of a set of services for a specific category and that there’s a parent page with all the services.
Easy backtracking rather than bouncing.
Sure, they can use the browser back button, but allowing users to attack your site quickly improves retention, engagement and dwell time.
They improve navigation efficiency, which, while it might not be one of your considerations, is certainly for your visitors.
Reduced friction.
Everything on your site should be there to please your users, and breadcrumbs offer a ‘trail’ through your site, especially if it’s a complex one, for users to find their way back to where they came from.
This is a genuine need, even if they are only a few clicks deep: they do not know your site as you do, so providing this path leads to better engagement.
Improved mobile experience.
On phones, breadcrumbs are often used in place of the generic burger menu by visitors that land from the SERPs onto a landing page deep in your site.
Without these, it can be very hard for users to click into additional relevant content so they can bounce back to the search.
Any lack of breadcrumbs on a complex site can cause visitors to bounce.
Using breadcrumbs in the right way.
If you have them, they must be used correctly.
- They should follow a logical structure:
- Home > Category > Subcategory > Page
- They should contain natural keywords
- They should use schema markup to help search engines display them in the search
- They should be clickable and placed consistently across your site
This will enhance both your SEO and your site’s usability and is another piece of the puzzle for optimising your site.
If your site is in a competitive niche, it can also mean the difference between ranking inside or outside the top ten.
About this article.
We always try and publish useful and helpful content on our website. ‘Why Every Website Needs Breadcrumbs: Boosting SEO and User Experience’ has been written by David Foreman and researched (links below).
Our experience
We’ve helped many clients with SEO, and we’ve seen firsthand the difference that adding (or removing) breadcrumbs can make for a site.
If we are working with a client whose site does not have breadcrumbs, we add them and then see the positive impact they make by looking at Search Console and keyword placements post addition.
Our expertise
We can add breadcrumbs to any WordPress site, so if yours is missing them, adding them to your theme files is not a large job.
It usually takes less than an hour to do the work and you will notice the benefit in a few weeks.
Why you can trust us
We are not in the business of telling clients to add stuff to their sites that will not improve them.
In fact, the best websites often place the importance of content over and above the design aesthetic.
It is widely understood that breadcrumbs are beneficial for your SEO and your visitor’s engagement with your site, so we’re not simply suggesting you add them for the sake of it.
David Foreman
Dave is the MD at Toast and has been building bespoke WordPress sites for over 15 years. He currently gets involved in the scoping and planning of new sites together with content and SEO strategy to get sites ranking.
