Showing people where they landed

The problem it solves

Nobody arrives at your homepage and works inward any more. They land deep in the site from a search result, on a page they have never seen, on a site they may not know.

The first question is where am I, and the second is what else is here. A breadcrumb answers both before they have to look for a menu.

It is one line of text and it converts a dead end into a doorway.

Nobody arrives at the homepage and works inward any more. They land deep in the site from a result, on a page they have never seen.

What it should show

The path from the homepage to the current page, one step per level, in the order somebody would travel it.

Each step other than the current page should be a link. The current page appears as text, since linking a page to itself confuses everybody including assistive technology.

Keep the labels the same as the page titles they point at. Inventing shorter names for the trail makes the site feel like two different sites.

• The path from the homepage to the current page
• One step per level, in travel order
• Every step but the last as a link
• The current page as plain text, not a link to itself
• Labels matching the titles they point at
• Marked up so a search engine can read it

Where it goes

Above the main heading, at the top of the content. That is where people look, and it is where assistive technology users expect it.

Do not hide it on mobile. The visitor on a phone is the one most likely to have arrived from search and most in need of orientation.

Keep it visually quiet. It is a signpost, not a headline, and it should not compete with the page title.

Do not hide it on mobile. The phone visitor is the one most likely to have arrived from search and most in need of orientation.

The search result benefit

Search engines can show a breadcrumb trail in place of the raw address in a result, which is easier to read and tells a searcher more about the page.

That needs the trail marked up so a machine can read it, not just styled to look like one.

It is a small presentational gain and it is free once the structure exists.

It is not a replacement for structure

A breadcrumb describes a hierarchy. If your site does not have one, the trail will be invented and it will confuse rather than help.

So the honest order is to decide your sections first, put every page in one, then show the trail.

Where a page genuinely belongs to two sections, pick the primary one for the trail and link the other in the content.

A breadcrumb describes a hierarchy, so the sections have to exist first — see site structure and hub pages.

Accessibility

Mark the trail as a navigation region with a label, so somebody using a screen reader can skip it or find it deliberately.

The current page should be marked as current, not just styled differently, since color alone communicates nothing to a listener.

The separators between levels should be decorative rather than read aloud, or every trail becomes a recital of slashes.

Mark it as a navigation region with a label so it can be skipped, and mark the current page as current rather than only styling it differently.

How ours work

Every page written by Website Builder Studio carries a breadcrumb from the homepage through its hub to the page, marked up so a search engine can read it and labeled so assistive technology can skip it.

The trail is generated from the same structure that produces the hub listings, so it cannot describe a section the page does not actually belong to.

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes, validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards, which includes confirming the trail resolves to real pages.