Breadcrumbs: A short trail of links, usually above the title, showing where a page sits in the site: Home › Recipes › Bread › Sourdough. Each step links one level up.
What they do for a site
Breadcrumbs give every page a link one level up, so a reader who lands deep in a site from search can step back to the section they want. They also give crawlers a consistent path from each post to its category and the home page, which keeps click depth predictable. They are navigational links: useful for orientation, but they say nothing about a page’s neighbours the way a link in a sentence does.
Breadcrumbs in search results
With BreadcrumbList structured data, Google can show the trail in place of the URL. Its documentation says a breadcrumb should represent a typical user path to a page, instead of mirroring the URL structure. Since January 2025, Google shows breadcrumbs in desktop results only; on mobile it shows just the domain.
Setting them up on WordPress
- Yoast SEO and Rank Math both include breadcrumbs with structured data, added through a block, shortcode or theme setting; many themes have their own.
- Choose one primary category per post. A post on hiking boots filed under both Gear and Hiking needs one trail, or readers and markup disagree.
- Test a page with Google’s Rich Results Test after enabling them.
For a recipe blog, a trail like Home › Recipes › Bread › Sourdough helps both readers and crawlers. It does not replace contextual links from related posts. The guide to navigational and contextual links explains how the two kinds work together.