If you are looking for the most effective way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site, don’t miss our tutorial. It gives you a detailed guide. Now, let’s dive into the following sections.
What are Breadcrumbs and why are they important?
Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trails are secondary navigation menus in WordPress. They are different from the main navigation menu system in WordPress. Breadcrumbs play an important role in displaying the visitors’ current location and the route they took to get there. This feature allows the visitors to easily step back to any location in their journey from the root link of the website.
In addition, they not only help you enhance the user experience on your website but also improve your site ranking by decreasing your bounce rate.
How to Add Breadcrumbs to your WordPress site?
At present, there are plenty of useful tools on the internet that allow you to display breadcrumb navigation links in WordPress. All in One SEO is one of the best WordPress SEO Plugins on the market. It has over 3 million active installations. It comes with a wide range of advanced features to improve your website’s SEO, including the breadcrumbs feature.
To use this method, you first need to install this plugin.
Step 1: Install the plugin
The process of installing this plugin is quite simple, just go to Plugins > Add New and type the plugin’s name in the search bar. Then click on the “Install Now” button and Activate it.
Step 2: Configure the plugin settings
- Enable breadcrumbs
Once the plugin has been installed, navigate to the All in one SEO > General settings page. Then switch to the Breadcrumbs tab.
Now, you need to turn on the enable breadcrumbs option to display breadcrumb navigation links on your website.
This will show various breadcrumb display settings that you can utilize on your website.
From here, you can see 4 ways to show the breadcrumb navigation menu on your WordPress site.
- Change breadcrumbs separator
Keep scrolling down the screen and you will see the “Breadcrumb settings” section. From here, you can change the separator, show or hide the home link, add a prefix, and much more.
There are several variations to choose from; you can click on “Show More” to get more.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click on the “Save Changes” button.
Step 3: Display Breadcrumbs on your website
- Manually adding breadcrumb navigation on individual post/page using a shortcode
This is the easiest method to display breadcrumb navigation links in your WordPress posts/pages.
First of all, you need to visit the post, page, or product where you want to display breadcrumbs. Then, add the following shortcode at the location where you want the breadcrumb navigation menu to appear.
If you are using the Gutenberg editor, the shortcode immediately converts into a shortcode block once you add this shortcode to the editor.
- Adding breadcrumb navigation using a Gutenberg block
This method allows you to add breadcrumb navigation on your website without remembering the shortcode. You just need to use the “AIOSEO-Breadcrumbs” block. However, it is only suitable for those who are using the Gutenberg editor.
Similarly, you need to visit the post/page where you want to show the breadcrumb navigation and click on the “+” icon displayed in the top left corner of the screen to add the “AIOSEO-Breadcrumbs” block.
This plugin will immediately display a live preview of your breadcrumb navigation links in the content area.
Don’t forget to click on the “Publish/Update” button to store your changes.
- Adding breadcrumb navigation to the sidebar using a widget
After installing the plugin, the AIOSEO Breadcrumbs widget will be automatically added to your website. You can simply visit the Appearance > Widgets page to check it.
Using this method, you can display breadcrumb navigation menus in any widget area supported by the theme you are using.
As we mentioned above, you just go to the “Appearance > Widgets page and find the “AIOSEO-Breadcrumbs” widget. Then, drag this widget to the sidebar.
You need to provide a title for the widget, and don’t forget to click on the “Save” button before exiting.
Now, you can visit your website and see how the breadcrumb navigation menu appears on all posts/pages.
- Adding breadcrumb navigation using PHP code
This method enables you to show breadcrumb navigation trails exactly where you want them to appear. Firstly, you need to define where you would like to display them. There are many locations that you can use to add breadcrumbs, such as below the title of each post/page, or product title, and much more.
Now, you need to open your theme files using an FTP client. Then, copy the following code and paste it into the location where you want to display the breadcrumb navigation links.
<?php if( function_exists( 'aioseo_breadcrumbs' ) ) aioseo_breadcrumbs(); ?>
Don’t forget to save your changes and upload the file back to your website.
You can now visit your website to see the breadcrumb links in action.
Summary
We have just demonstrated the easiest way to help you add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site. We hope that this article is useful for your site. If you have any questions or queries, don’t hesitate to mention them in the comment section below.
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