Breadcrumbs in WordPress, what they are and how to configure them

What are Breadcrumbs in WordPress

Even intuitively, we all have a very rough idea of ​​what what is Breadcrumbs in WordPress. After all, we are also Internet users and we surf regularly, so we have come across it often.

Although, possibly, many times we have not paid too much attention to them or even we have not noticed them. Its main purpose is to answer the question “Where am I, how did I get here and how can I go back or go to other similar pages?”.

To achieve this functionality, the breadcrumbs “mark” the path that must be followed, through the architecture of the website, to get from the main page of the website (that is, the cover) to the page you are viewing. the user.

To get an idea, the structure from a trail of breadcrumbs will have a format similar to the following: Home > Page level 1 > Page level 2 > … > Current page

Usually, as we will see in the best practices, each level includes a link to the main page of that level. The green box in the following image shows an example:

Click on image to enlarge

In this case, the main page is the “Blog”, which has no link. The next level of the crumb trail is for a category on this blog, “WordPress,” which has a link to the index page for that category.

And, finally, there is the title, truncated so that it is not too long, of the article, which has no link since it is the current page.

Thanks to this breadcrumb trail, if the current article is not of interest to the user, the user can see that it belongs to a category, that it will have more articles on the topic, and can go directly to the category page to view them.

If you wonder why the expression “breadcrumbs”is based on the story of Hansel and Gretel, who used a piece of bread to crumble it and leave a trail of crumbs along the way that would allow them to return home later.

You can also find the expression “Ariadne’s thread”based on the Greek mythology of the labyrinth of the minotaur, but in this case the Anglo-Saxon culture has prevailed (like almost everything related to the Internet).