Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb navigation in plain English

A breadcrumb is a small navigation trail, usually near the top of a page, showing where the page sits in the site: for example Home › Services › Boiler repair. Each step is a link back up the hierarchy. Breadcrumbs can be marked up with structured data so Google understands them.

How to check breadcrumb navigation on your site

Open a few deeper pages on your site and see whether there's a breadcrumb trail, whether it reflects the real structure and whether each step is a working link. Check on mobile too, where breadcrumbs are sometimes hidden. If you use breadcrumb markup, test it with Google's Rich Results Test.

A worked example

A visitor lands on a page about one type of garden fencing from Google. The breadcrumb shows "Home › Fencing › Close-board fencing", so they tap "Fencing" to compare other styles instead of leaving. The landscaper keeps a visitor who might otherwise have gone back to the results.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Breadcrumbs that don't match the actual site structure.
• Trails based on the visitor's history rather than the page's position.
• Hiding them on mobile, where they're most useful.
• Making the current page a link to itself.

Why a small site should care

Breadcrumbs help visitors who land deep in your site from search. They can see where they are and move to broader sections in one tap. They also add sensible internal links and reinforce your site structure for search engines.

They're particularly useful on sites with several levels, such as shops, practices with many treatments or firms with many services. On a five-page site you may not need them at all.

Connected technical terms

• Breadcrumb schema: Structured data describing the page's position in the site hierarchy.
• Site architecture: How pages are organised and linked.
• Internal linking: Links between pages on the same site that help users and distribute crawl paths.