Breadcrumbs
What are breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are the secondary navigation that helps users understand where they are on the website. It's usually a single line of text that is located on the top of the page to show the page hierarchy. So users can easily know what the current page (like a product page) is and go back to a higher level page anytime (like a product category page).
Here is an example from the Adidas website:
Or you can see it at the top of this page:
Home > Slim SEO > Breadcrumbs
Each item in the breadcrumbs is a link, that describes the "steps" that users can follow (click) from the main page (homepage) to the current page. Whenever users want to go back to a previous step, they can simply click on these links.
The term of breadcrumbs is borrowed from the tale of Hansel and Gretel where the kids drop a trail of breadcrumbs to trace their way back.
Why breadcrumbs are important for SEO?
Breadcrumbs help search engines understand the structure of your website. If the content on your website is organized hierarchically (which you should always do), then search engine spiders can easily navigate and index your pages by scan links on each "step" of the breadcrumbs. This ensures search engines don't miss any links on the website.
Besides, breadcrumbs help connect all the pages on your website into a hierarchical graph. So no pages are orphaned (e.g. have no links to them) which always is a bad sign of SEO.
How to add breadcrumbs to your website?
To add breadcrumbs to your website, Slim SEO provides the [slim_seo_breadcrumbs] shortcode. Using the shortcode, you can output the breadcrumbs anywhere in your theme.
Accessibility is important for both users and SEO. So, in Slim SEO's breadcrumbs, we add aria-* attributes to ensure the breadcrumbs are more accessible to people with disabilities.
Shortcode attributes
The [slim_seo_breadcrumbs] shortcode has the following attributes (all are optional):
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
separator | The separator between breadcrumb items. Default ». |
display_current | Whether or not to display the current page. Default true. |
taxonomy | The taxonomy that you want to output in the breadcrumb trail when you're on a single post (or post type). Default category. |
label_home | Label for the home item. Default Home. |
label_search | Label for the search results page. Default Search Results for “%s”. |
label_404 | Label for 404 page. Default Page not found. |
Styling breadcrumbs
To make it easier to style breadcrumbs, the plugin uses some CSS classes:
breadcrumbs: For the wrapper of the breadcrumbs.- Each breadcrumb item has a class
breadcrumb. - The first and the last breadcrumb item has a class
breadcrumb--firstandbreadcrumb--lastcorrespondingly. It's very useful when you want to style the "Home" with an icon or something similar. - Separator has a class
breadcrumb__separator.
Using these CSS classes, you can style every detail of the breadcrumb trail.
Outputting breadcrumbs
If you want to output the breadcrumbs in your theme, add the following snippet in your theme file
echo do_shortcode( '[slim_seo_breadcrumbs]' );
Breadcrumbs schema
Slim SEO automatically creates a schema for breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs schema inherits all the settings in the shortcode. So if you output the shortcode in your theme, all links in the breadcrumbs are parsed, and the schema will use these links again.