How to add breadcrumbs with BreadcrumbList markup
Breadcrumb navigation with BreadcrumbList structured data exposes your site hierarchy to engines and visitors. Add a visible trail from the home page to the current page, mark it up in JSON-LD, and link every level except the last one, which is the page itself.
By ratemysite.ai editorial team. Updated .
How do you fix it?
- Add a visible breadcrumb trail near the top of inner pages, such as Home > Guides > Canonical tags.
- Link every level except the current page, with real anchor tags.
- Add JSON-LD of @type BreadcrumbList with a ListItem for each level, including position, name and item URL.
- Make sure the names and URLs match the visible trail and the page hierarchy.
- Validate the markup, then re-run the audit and confirm the Breadcrumbs check passes.
What are breadcrumbs?
Breadcrumbs are a row of links that shows where the current page sits in the site, from the home page down. They help visitors move up a level without using the back button, and they show crawlers how pages relate. BreadcrumbList is the Schema.org type that describes that trail as data. A typical shop might have 3 levels, such as Home, Category and Product, and each one becomes a list item with a position.
How do I keep the trail accurate?
Build the trail from the real site structure, not from the visitor's path. Every level should be a page that exists and returns content. Number the positions from 1 at the home page and keep names short and consistent with the page titles. If a page can live in several categories, choose one main trail and use it everywhere. Check the markup after template changes, because a missing item breaks the sequence and engines may ignore the whole trail. Test one page from each template, such as a post, a category and a product, rather than only the first page you build.
How much does this check matter?
- This check is worth about 1.5% of the overall score.
- A finished report is reused for 24 hours before you can re-analyze it.
- Each page is fetched with a timeout of 10 seconds, and HTML larger than 2 MB is not audited.
What else do people ask?
- Should the home page have breadcrumbs?
- No. A trail is useful only on inner pages, starting from the home page and ending on the current page.
- Do breadcrumbs show in search results?
- Google often shows them in place of the URL on mobile and desktop, which makes the result easier to read.