Breadcrumbs on a Small Site

What they are for

A breadcrumb trail shows the path from the top of the site to the page somebody is on.

Its job is orientation: telling somebody who arrived from a search where they have landed and what else is nearby.

That job matters on a site with genuine depth, where a page might be four levels down and its context is not obvious.

On a site where every page is one click from the home page, there is no path to show and the trail states the obvious.

When they earn their place

• Real sections with pages inside them.
• Products within categories.
• A blog organised by topic.
• Three levels or more.
• Most arrivals from search, not the home page.

The last is the condition that matters most and is true of nearly every site. Somebody arriving from a search has no idea what else exists, and on a deep site a trail tells them in one line.

Where they do nothing

Which is most small business sites.

Nine pages, all in the menu, none nested inside another.

A trail reading Home then Contact is a line of clutter above every page telling somebody something they already knew.

It also takes vertical space at the top of the page, which is the space this whole subject has been arguing about.

Where your menu shows every page, the menu is doing the job a trail would do.

Adding them because larger sites have them is copying a solution to a problem you do not have.

The one reason to add them anyway

Worth knowing, since it is not about the page.

Search results frequently show a breadcrumb path in place of the plain address, which reads better and tells somebody more before they click.

That comes from structured markup describing the hierarchy, which can be present whether or not a visible trail is.

So a small site can add the markup for the results and skip the visible trail on the page.

Ask whoever maintains the site to add it, since most platforms produce it automatically and some do not.

Then check a few of your own results to see what is being shown.

A worked example

A business added breadcrumbs across an eleven-page site after reading that they helped.

Every page carried a line reading Home followed by the page name, which was already the heading directly beneath it.

Nobody clicked them, which the analytics confirmed after two months.

They removed the visible trail and kept the structured markup.

Their search results continued to show a readable path and the pages recovered the space.

The following year they added a genuine section with six pages inside it, and put a visible trail on those six only.

If you do use them

A few rules that make them work rather than decorate.

Show the actual path, not the route the person took, since a history trail is confusing and browsers already have a back button.

Make every level except the current page a link, and make the current page plain text rather than a link to itself.

Keep them small and above the heading, since they are orientation rather than content.

Use the page names people would recognise rather than internal category names.

And on a phone, either keep them to one line by shortening or drop the middle levels, since a wrapping trail is worse than none.

They are not a substitute for the menu

Worth stating, since they sometimes get treated as one.

A trail shows one path upward and tells somebody nothing about the rest of the site.

Somebody who has landed deep and wants a different section still needs the menu to get there.

So breadcrumbs supplement navigation and never replace it, and a site that has thinned its menu on the strength of adding them has made things worse.

The related need is a clear route to the main sections from every page, which the menu or the footer provides.

The related question is whether your structure is real

Since a trail exposes it.

If writing the path for a page is difficult, the page does not sit anywhere in particular, which is worth knowing.

Pages that belong nowhere are usually pages created for a reason nobody remembers, and they tend to be the ones with no traffic.

Try writing the trail for every page on paper, and note the ones you cannot.

That exercise is more useful than the feature, and it is free.

They matter more for keyboard and screen reader users

A point that shifts the balance slightly on a site with real depth.

Somebody navigating by keyboard or with a screen reader has no peripheral sense of where a page sits, so a trail read out near the top is genuine orientation rather than decoration.

For that to work it needs to be marked up as navigation and labelled, so it is announced as a breadcrumb rather than as a run of links.

Ask whoever builds it to use the proper markup rather than a styled list of links with separators typed in.

That costs nothing extra and is the difference between a trail that helps and one that adds four unexplained links to the top of every page.

The counter-case

They are cheap and harmless.

A small unobtrusive trail costs almost nothing, and on a site that grows it is already there when it becomes useful.

Some visitors also use them habitually, particularly on shops, where moving up to a category is a common action.

And the structured markup is worth having regardless of the visible version.

Skip the visible trail on a flat site, add the markup, and revisit when you have real sections.

Deciding

1. Count your levels.
2. Skip them if everything is one click deep.
3. Add the structured markup either way.
4. Check your own search results.
5. Add a visible trail only to real sections.
6. Keep it to one line on a phone.
7. Write the path for every page as a test.

Step seven is the part worth doing whatever you decide, since a page whose path you cannot write is a page that does not belong anywhere.

Where people go after arriving is covered in the second page they visit.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.