What are the ad­vant­ages of bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion?

Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion is an important element of user guidance on websites and apps. It helps users identify their current location within the site structure and quickly navigate back to higher-level pages.

What is bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion?

Who doesn’t remember the classic Grimm fairy tale ‘Hansel and Gretel’? Two siblings, abandoned in a forest, leave a trail of bread­crumbs behind them to find their way back home. The children end up in the clutches of a man-eating witch but manage to escape and find their way out of the woods. So what does this dark tale have to do with web design? It’s simple: the World Wide Web—es­pe­cially complex websites—can feel like a vast, dark forest. When nav­ig­at­ing large online stores or sprawling web portals, users can sometimes feel just as lost and wish they had bread­crumbs to help them easily find their way back to higher-level pages.

Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion is a secondary nav­ig­a­tion element, which is used to support the usual menus found at the top of a website. It provides better ori­ent­a­tion for users in a number of ways. On the one hand, bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion allows the user to always see where they are on the website, and on the other hand, it also typically indicates which path leads to higher-level areas. ‘Bread­crumb trails’ represent the in­di­vidu­al stations logically, suc­cess­ively, and usually hier­arch­ic­ally. Users move from the homepage via the category pages to the concrete content. The bread­crumb trail offers links to all these stations. This allows users to un­der­stand the structure of the website and go back with just one click.

Types of bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion

As such, bread­crumbs on websites fulfil the same function as the bread­crumbs in the fairytale – with the crucial dif­fer­ence that the bread­crumbs cannot be picked away by birds, which is what happens to Hansel and Gretel in the story. There are various rep­res­ent­a­tions of bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion: arrow symbols or the greater than sign (>) are wide­spread, act as a separator, and represent the hierarchy of the website. Arrow-shaped graphic buttons are also commonly used. This typically results in a path that follows a structure similar to the following:

Home > Category > Current Position

On par­tic­u­larly complex pages, users often navigate through multiple cat­egor­ies and sub­cat­egor­ies between the homepage and their current location. In such cases, bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion is referred to as a location bread­crumb because it rep­res­ents both the starting point and the hier­arch­ic­al path leading to the current page. A less common al­tern­at­ive is the path bread­crumb, which reflects the actual sequence of clicks a user has taken—re­gard­less of the site’s structure. This can be confusing on complex websites, as the path may appear erratic or in­con­sist­ent. A path bread­crumb maps the user’s browsing behavior across the site, even if it involves jumping between unrelated sections. This type of bread­crumb might look like the following:

Home > Category 1 > Home > Category 3 > Category 2 > Home

A third variant are category- or attribute-based bread­crumbs. These are often found in the e-commerce sector, par­tic­u­larly online shops. They show the user which category the currently open page belongs to, and its at­trib­utes. At the same time, it collects meta-in­form­a­tion. For example, a pair of jeans is a category of trousers, but it can also have the at­trib­utes ‘blue’ and ‘size 32’:

Home > Clothing > Menswear > Trousers > Jeans > Blue > Size 32

Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion and usability

At this point, some people might be asking them­selves what bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion is really useful for. After all, there are already menu bars that we navigate through. Every current browser also has buttons for scrolling back and forth. These aspects make it possible to navigate a site, but in some cases they can be cum­ber­some and com­plic­ated.

One of the key prin­ciples of good user ex­per­i­ence design is: the fewer clicks users need, the better the ex­per­i­ence. This rule is es­pe­cially important when it comes to nav­ig­a­tion. Few things are more frus­trat­ing than having to con­stantly hit the browser’s back button or navigate through the main menu from scratch. Bread­crumbs help solve this issue by always showing users exactly where they are on the website. Compared to a single nav­ig­a­tion menu, a bread­crumb trail makes the site’s hierarchy and structure much clearer and easier to follow.

Even if users land on a target page via an external or internal link—without clicking through from the homepage—they can instantly see where they are by glancing at the bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion. It also en­cour­ages users to explore the site further and reduces the risk of them bouncing. The parent category is just one click away, and there’s no need to start a new search thanks to the bread­crumb trail. This feature also helps retain users who arrived on a subpage through external websites or search engines.

Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion from an SEO per­spect­ive

What’s good for users is also good for search engines. This core principle of online marketing applies to bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion as well. Google now often displays bread­crumbs in its search results (SERPs) instead of long, cluttered URLs—though since 2025, this no longer applies to mobile devices in order to maintain clarity on smaller screens. Clearly, search engines view bread­crumbs as a positive signal. Even before clicking on a result, users can see what to expect and which category the page belongs to.

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Looking at the labels of in­di­vidu­al bread­crumbs, the second major SEO benefit becomes clear: bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion offers the perfect op­por­tun­ity to create natural internal links enriched with relevant keywords.

A logically struc­tured web design with bread­crumbs not only makes nav­ig­a­tion easier for users, but also helps search engine crawlers un­der­stand the structure and relevance of a website. Crawlers follow internal links and index the pages they find. Ideally, this results in a better ranking for the site. For users, improved nav­ig­a­tion can lead to longer time spent on the site—and both session duration and bounce rate are important ranking factors for search engines.

The dos and don’ts of using bread­crumbs properly

Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion can improve the usability and even search engine ranking – provided it is properly in­teg­rated, sensibly placed and offers added value. In the following examples, we outline the dos and don’ts of bread­crumb­ing using examples:

Bread­crumbs must offer added value

There are only a few cases where bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion can actually cause confusion—one of them is when it serves no real purpose. Websites with a shallow structure and only one or a few pages don’t need bread­crumbs. In such cases, nav­ig­a­tion is handled through the main menu or the page header. In contrast, the bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion on the Adidas website is a good example of how this feature can be both useful and add real value.

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In the Adidas online store, bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion is a valuable addition because the more complex the search queries, the more important it is for users to easily reset their search. It also ensures that users always know where they are on the site and which filters are currently active.

Bread­crumbs must be logical and should not be confusing

Websites that offer too many nav­ig­a­tion options risk over­whelm­ing their users. Re­dund­ancy is es­pe­cially prob­lem­at­ic. While bread­crumbs are generally subtle and integrate well into most designs, they don’t provide any real value if they simply duplicate the function of the main nav­ig­a­tion menu. Double doesn’t always mean better. But it’s a different story in this positive example. On the Envato Tuts+ website, real value is added, and the bread­crumb trail is subtly and clearly in­teg­rated. The bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion is com­pletely logical, easy to follow, and fits seam­lessly into the overall site design.

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Less well-designed solutions confuse users with com­pletely illogical bread­crumb trails. In some, for instance, only the homepage appears in the path—there is no parent category. The trail simply reflects the current page. The clickable link is equally pointless, as it redirects to the page the user is already on. Without context, this position indicator offers little added value and may even cause more confusion by linking to the current page.

Bread­crumbs also shouldn’t be too long, as they can clutter the interface, overwhelm users, and reduce clarity—es­pe­cially on mobile devices. Only key levels should be shown to avoid re­dund­ancy and minimise cognitive load. Overly detailed trails can also harm usability and SEO. Ideally, bread­crumbs should be concise, relevant, and limited to 3–4 levels, with the current page shown as plain text.

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Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion supports the primary nav­ig­a­tion, it does not replace it

Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion should only be used as a support and sup­ple­ment to the main nav­ig­a­tion. They should be kept small, so as not to distract from the actual content. It should not over­shad­ow the primary nav­ig­a­tion tool, and it should only serve as fine-level nav­ig­a­tion and fast-paced ori­ent­a­tion. Only in rare cases—such as on the Tesco website, where bread­crumbs function as a visual divider—does a more extensive bread­crumb setup enhance usability.

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Critics of bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion might argue that, in cases like this, it reflects poor web design and high­lights the site’s lack of clarity. However, a closer look at the Tesco screen­shot quickly reveals how cum­ber­some nav­ig­a­tion would be without bread­crumbs. The online platform features options across a wide range of cat­egor­ies that users can browse through. Its structure runs deep, starting from the homepage and branching out into various sub­cat­egor­ies. Bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion helps users stay oriented within these layers. It also speeds up selection and allows for quick jumping between cat­egor­ies.

How can bread­crumbs be im­ple­men­ted?

There are several ways to create bread­crumbs, depending on your needs and the CMS you’re using. One of the simplest methods is to build bread­crumbs using HTML. You can then customise their ap­pear­ance with CSS. The following code example demon­strates how to implement bread­crumbs with HTML:

<nav aria-label="Breadcrumb">
    <ol>
        <li><a href="/index.html">Home</a></li>
        <li><a href="/ebene1.html">Level 1</a></li>
        <li aria-current="page">Subitem of Level 1</li>
    </ol>
</nav>

In the code example above, the location of the current position is the only missing aspect for a logical, location-based nav­ig­a­tion system. No further hyperlink is required, since you are already at this location.

The aria-label attribute is a feature from the ARIA spe­cific­a­tion (Ac­cess­ible Rich Internet Ap­plic­a­tions) and is used to provide screen readers with ad­di­tion­al de­scrip­tions for an element, helping to improve ac­cess­ib­il­ity.

To make bread­crumbs more search engine friendly, you can op­tion­ally use microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD. When bread­crumbs are se­mantic­ally marked up in the source code this way, search engine crawlers can read them — making it possible to display them as rich snippets in the SERPs.

In addition to im­ple­ment­a­tion via HTML and CSS, there are several other ways to add bread­crumbs. The simplest option is often through content man­age­ment systems (CMS), where im­ple­ment­a­tion is typically quick and only takes a few clicks in the backend. For CMSs that don’t offer built-in solutions, suitable plugins are usually available. With PHP or JavaS­cript, it’s also possible to integrate bread­crumb nav­ig­a­tion into dynamic websites.