What is Breadcrumb Navigation?
Breadcrumb navigation is a trail that reveals the position of the current page in relation to the homepage. When the contents of a website are divided into sections, then into subsections and like that, the breadcrumb navigation menu can be very useful. Here the content is logically organized hierarchical order.
You can see this kind of logical arrangements of the content in e-commerce websites. If you visit Amazon websites, you can choose a category from the homepage. In each category, there might be several sub-categories and inside them sub-subcategories. It is like a trail and it would look like this.
Categories > Men’ Fashion > T-Shirts & Polos
Showing this trail on the top of the website as a secondary navigation is called breadcrumb menu. A breadcrumb menu in a blog related two web development may look like this.
Home > Resources > Graphics > Illustrations > Current Page
Most websites, whether it is an e-commerce store or a blog, follow a pyramid structure where each page would have several subpages and each of these subpages may have their own subpages.
Why Use Breadcrumb Navigation?
When users dig deep websites like that, they may get lost in the website. In this kind of situation, having a menu that shows the trail will be helpful for the visitors to understand where they are on the website and to go back to a higher stage on the website structure.
Home > Resources > Graphics > Illustrations > Current Page
In the above example, if the visitor doesn’t like the “illustrations” and want to go back and explore other options in the “Graphics”, they can simply click on the “Graphics” link on the breadcrumb navigation.
Convenient for Visitors: With breadcrumb navigation, visitors can click on any item and go to that page and continue exploring. They can go to any higher stage in the hierarchy and continue browsing the website.
Reduces the Number of Clicks to Reach in a Page
You can see the items in the breadcrumb navigation and click on appropriate one to easily go to different pages.
Reduces Bounce Rate
When the visitors are tired of the current page, the breadcrumb navigation may prompt them to continue browsing other sections on the website.
