UX Glossary · B
Breadcrumb
Also: Breadcrumb trail
A trail showing where the current page sits in the site hierarchy, with each ancestor clickable.
A breadcrumb shows the path from the top of a site to the current page, with every level above the current one being a link. The name comes from Hansel and Gretel, though the fairy tale trail was for getting back out, which is roughly the point.
When it earns its space
Breadcrumbs help when three things are true: the site has a real hierarchy, it is more than two levels deep, and people arrive on deep pages from search rather than by navigating down from the homepage.
That last condition is why they matter more than they look. Someone landing on a product page from Google has no idea what sits around it. A breadcrumb answers “where am I” and offers the category as a next step, which is a far better recovery than the back button.
They also produce the hierarchy display in Google results when marked up with
BreadcrumbList structured data.
Where they are pointless
A flat site has nothing to show. A linear checkout has a step indicator instead, which is a
different pattern answering a different question. And a breadcrumb that just says
Home > Current page is decoration.