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Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is a small, clickable trail that shows visitors where they are on a website.

What is breadcrumb navigation?

Breadcrumb navigation is a small path above the page content that shows where the current page is located within the website’s structure. It looks something like this:

Home > Glossary > Breadcrumb Navigation

It shows the current location and the path to get there at a glance. The previous steps are usually clickable, allowing users to easily and directly jump to parent pages.

Breadcrumb navigation serves two purposes. It helps visitors find their way around and makes the website’s hierarchy clear to search engines. When properly maintained and technically sound, this path can even appear in search results instead of a cryptic web address.

Where does breadcrumb navigation come from?

The name was borrowed from the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” in which the siblings scattered breadcrumbs to find their way out of the forest.

This navigation path became established on websites as early as the 1990s and gained importance as websites became increasingly extensive and deeply structured.

Why is breadcrumb navigation important?

Visitors often don’t arrive at a website via the homepage. Suddenly, they find themselves on a subpage and wonder: Where am I, and what else is there?

The breadcrumb provides the answer and helps with orientation without requiring much thought. Visitors who can find their way around are more likely to stay. Those who feel lost, on the other hand, are more likely to leave quickly.

In addition, the breadcrumb trail strengthens the website’s internal linking structure, which in turn improves its readability for search engines.

Advantages

  • Breadcrumb navigation provides better orientation and shorter paths.
  • The additional internal links make it easier for search engines to understand the website.
  • Well-maintained and properly marked-up breadcrumbs can also result in a cleaner presentation in search results.

Challenges

Breadcrumb navigation can only display what is structurally present, and thus requires a clean, logical page hierarchy. On websites where content is scattered haphazardly, even the breadcrumb trail offers no orientation whatsoever.

In addition, displaying breadcrumbs on small screens can be a problem that requires a space-saving solution so that the path doesn’t take up half the screen.

Example

An engineer, while exploring the web, lands on a detail page for a servo motor. From the path “Products > Drive Technology > Servo Motors,” he can see at a glance that the manufacturer offers a broader range of products in the field of drive technology.

With a single click, he jumps to the overview without having to wade through a main menu or other links.

Related terms

Internal Linking Internal links are links that connect individual pages on a website. UX (User Experience) User Experience (UX) is the experience a visitor has on a website or app. Structured Data Structured data is additional information in the source code that helps search engines and other systems categorize a page’s content more accurately. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the process of optimizing a website so that it can be found by search engines like Google—ideally at the very top of the search results.