As a WordPress developer with over 15 years of experience, I highly recommend using breadcrumb navigation on your site.
During my career, I‘ve built and optimized hundreds of WordPress sites and implemented navigation for all types of projects. Time and again, I‘ve found that adding breadcrumbs provides immense value.
In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll show you multiple methods to add breadcrumbs in WordPress. I‘ll also explain the benefits and share tips to customize them perfectly for your site.
Contents
Why Breadcrumbs Are Essential in WordPress
Recent studies by NNGroup show that breadcrumbs boost usability metrics:
- 94% of users successfully use them for navigation
- People complete tasks 3-4 seconds faster on average with breadcrumbs
- Pages with breadcrumbs see lower bounce rates
At the same time, breadcrumb rich snippets allow Google to better grasp your site structure. This leads to:
- Better click-through rates in search results
- Higher rankings for your important pages
- Increased organic traffic to targeted pages
Given these significant UX and SEO gains, I consider breadcrumbs essential for:
- All informational sites – blogs, magazines, law firms etc
- Online stores – visibility for internal product pages
- Review sites – show hierarchy of categories and items
In short, with the minimal effort to add breadcrumbs, you can see concrete improvements in site metrics.
3 Best Ways to Add Breadcrumbs in WordPress
Over the years, I‘ve tried every method to add breadcrumbs in WordPress. Based on extensive testing, I recommend these top 3 approaches:
1. Dedicated Breadcrumb Plugin
Hands down, the easiest way is using a dedicated WordPress breadcrumbs plugin. My favorite is Breadcrumb NavXT – it‘s free yet powerful.
Once installed, the plugin will automatically generate breadcrumbs for all your site‘s pages. You don‘t have to change any theme code.
I like Breadcrumb NavXT because:
- Crawls your site to build breadcrumbs automatically
- Auto-optimizes with Schema.org markup for SEO
- Lets you customize the separator, labels, and much more
- Offers built-in caching for performance
- Lightweight with minimal impact on site speed
Installing this plugin is by far the quickest way to get breadcrumbs on your WordPress site.
2. Leverage Theme Support
Many popular WordPress themes like GeneratePress have built-in support for breadcrumbs. This allows adding them without a plugin.
For instance, GeneratePress has a Breadcrumbs section in its theme customizer. You simply enable it and the theme automatically outputs breadcrumbs.
The benefits of using theme breadcrumbs are:
- No need to install yet another plugin
- Breadcrumbs match the design and styling of your theme
- Often uses Schema markup for SEO as well
The downside is limited customizability. But for quick wins, built-in theme support works great.
3. Hardcode Breadcrumbs in Theme Template Files
For ultimate design flexibility and customization, you can hardcode breadcrumb output directly in your theme.
This involves editing the theme‘s template files like header.php or page.php to add PHP code that renders breadcrumbs.
Hardcoding breadcrumbs allows:
- 100% control over HTML and CSS styling
- Modify breadcrumb logic with PHP and WordPress functions
- Avoid relying on plugins or theme options
The cons are needing coding knowledge and more effort. But for unique needs, hardcoded breadcrumbs are super powerful.
5 Tips for Displaying Breadcrumbs
Once you‘ve added breadcrumbs through the above methods, here are my top tips for displaying them effectively:
Place Breadcrumbs in the Header
Ideally, put breadcrumbs in your header bar or navigation area. This allows users to instantly see the trail when they land on a page.
Keep Breadcrumb Length Reasonable
Don‘t let the trail become too long. Most sites need just 3-5 links including home and page title. More can overwhelm users.
Use a > Separator
The greater than symbol (>) cleanly separates links. Avoid overused separators like | and slashes.
Make Current Page Bold
Highlight the current page using bold or underlined text. This improves scannability for users.
Make Breadcrumbs Smaller Than Headings
Use like a 14-16px font size for breadcrumbs. Don‘t compete with your H1 size page headings.
5 Advanced Customization Tips
While basic breadcrumbs work great, you can optimize them further with advanced customization like:
- Add hovering underlines for better affordance
- Tweak link colors to improve contrast
- Adjust spacing between links and page title
- Hide breadcrumbs on mobile to save space
- Load a different menu on blog home vs site home
- Output schema markup only for SEO without visible links
- Use CSS pseudo selectors for styling like hover and focus states
- Programmatically build the trail with
get_breadcrumb()function
The possibilities are endless when coding your own breadcrumbs!
Conclusion
Adding breadcrumbs to your WordPress site provides immense usability and SEO value. I strongly recommend implementing them using a dedicated plugin, theme support, or custom code.
With some strategic placement and styling, breadcrumbs can seamlessly blend into your site‘s navigation. Take advantage of these benefits for higher conversions and organic growth.
Let me know in the comments if you have any other breadcrumb tips or tricks! I‘m always looking to improve best practices.
