Add Breadcrumb Trail in WordPress with Breadcrumb NavXT

Breadcrumbs are a great way to improve the usability and the user experience on a website. Breadcrumb NavXT is the most popular standalone plugin for adding Breadcrumb navigation to a website. It is active on more than 900,000 websites.

Breadcrumb navigation helps users and search engines better understand the page hierarchy of a website. This is especially useful on websites that have pages that are more than 2 levels deep.

You can install this free plugin from your WordPress Dashboard. Open the Add New page in the Plugins section. Search for Breadcrumb NavXT.

Some WordPress themes are already compatible with this plugin, including all my themes.

If your theme doesn’t have support for this plugin, you will have to add the following PHP code to some theme files. You could use the Theme File Editor to do this. That may create some issues with future theme updates, so it’s best to consult your theme developer.

<div class="breadcrumbs" typeof="BreadcrumbList" vocab="https://schema.org/">
<?php if(function_exists('bcn_display'))
{
bcn_display();
}?>
</div>

As an alternative, you could use the Breadcrumb Trail block in the Block Editor, but that’s not the most efficient solution.

There’s not much to tweak on the Settings page, all defaults are fine as they are.

But you might want to change the Breadcrumb Separator with something more pleasant. You can even use HTML code here.

If you do change it, don’t forget to add an empty space before and after your separator.

To make it easier for you, some SEO plugins include a Breadcrumb trail feature. But if you prefer to delegate separate features to separate plugins, then this plugin is a good option.

It goes well with The SEO Framework, a super fast and lightweight plugin that doesn’t include a Breadcrumb feature on purpose.