Bread crumbs in plain English

byBarryAA

3.5K followers

Updated 10 years ago

Hello to you all, today I want to do a blog on breadcrumbs, as I have seen a lot of questions about this topic and much confusion as to what they are and how to install them on your site.

Above is screen shot of bread crumbs on my candy crush blog and what breadcrumbs do is add site navigation to websites, so that anyone on your site can easily navigate there way back to where they started from.

The term bread crumbs comes form the analogy of leaving a trail of bread crumbs if you were walking in a place unknown to you, so you could find your way back, a bit like tying a piece of string to a tree and then walking through the forest and leaving a trail of string to find your way back again.

There are some different ways to insert them into your website, the first thing to understand is that bread crumbs is a theme function in other words you have to insert them into the code of your theme.

So first thing then, here is the bread crumbs code for my candy crush site which uses the twenty ten theme, this particular code is obtained from the Yoast SEO plugin I use on this site

<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>');} ?>

You will notice that it is a PHP code and it has to be inserted into the theme templates and the template to install it in, is the "page template" you get to theses templates by going to appearance>>editor then click on editor then a list of PHP templates will be displayed then click on the page template

You can see here that I have inserted the bread crumbs code, it goes under the first line of code where the word content" is in the template, once it is in, then just save changes and its done

Now a warning, before you go ahead with this, be aware that if you mess this up it will break your theme the best tip is this.

Copy and paste the whole page template code into a text editor like notepad and so if you mess up you can re insert the unbroken code and be back to normal, don't say I did not warn you

Some themes, like the one I use for my new iPhone site come with the ability to just select bread crumbs and they will display automatically like the one I use, called the genesis framework, which is one more reason I use a paid professional theme and not a free one

If you want to install bread crumbs, you need to Google your theme name and do a search for your bread crumbs plugin that goes with the theme you are using, if you install SEO by Yoast it will give you the code within the plugin, the code is located in the internal/external links section of this plugin

The advantage of bread crumbs is it increase your visitor/end-user experience and Google wants that also, so Google gives you a another tick in the box for you SEO

Remember the best way to learn WordPress is to use instant Wordpress software, this way you can play around to you hearts content without risking any damage to your own site

You can read my blog post on this here

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/bazboy247/blog/instant-wordpress

I Hope you now understand bread crumbs a little better now

Barry