Enable Breadcrumbs Yoast WordPress SEO

enable breadcrumbs yoast wordpress
Photo Credit: Progresso and Me!

 

It doesn’t take much to get my mind wandering to the topic of food. Nuggets! they are super delicious with breadcrumbs.. Okay before freaking you out, let me tell you that if you are here for the word in context of navigation of your site, you are in right place.

This is a fact that breadcrumbs can be proved great for your site. It makes navigation easy for users.

Why not explain what are Breadcrumbs?

If you are here for troubleshooting your breadcrumbs problem in WordPress, then you may already be familiar with the term. But as I am found to be loquacious, take it: Breadcrumbs are used for ease of navigation across websites. They tell user where (s)he is, and especially it is good for Google to find relevant keywords for your content. Probably they have already made your life easy hundreds of times even before you realizing it.

breadcrumbs navigation

Pros of having Breadcrumbs Navigation:

Information about current Location: Breadcrumbs show people their current location on a website they are exploring.

Ease of going to top-level Pages: They make it easy to go to top-level pages on the site. For example in above picture, one can go to top-level category Blogging easily.

Easy for users to understand: For them to use, there is no need for a user to be a “power user”. simple dudes can easily understand what is the meaning of having those tiny arrow like symbols.

Increase SEO: They are also very attractive and gaining popularity among bloggers because they allow Google to determine your site structure and crawl pages easily. Google will also show Breadcrumbs navigation in search results.

How to Enable Breadcrumbs on WordPress:

Although you can manually add breadcrumbs in your WordPress theme but the most robust option will be to install a plugin. The best option for all WordPress SEO and Breadcrumb like stuff is WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you have already installed and using it, very good but if you are not using this plugin then install it now. You cannot do SEO the easy way without installing this plugin.

Step 1: Enable

Login to your WordPress Dashboard. Hover over to SEO menu on the left side. Navigate to Internal Links.

enable breadbrumbs wordpress seo yoast

After this, you will see internal links settings page. breadcrumbs can be enabled or disabled from there.

wordpress seo yoast breadcrumbs settings

Click on the checkbox that calls itself “Enable Breadcrumbs “.  This will be a good idea to bold the last page name in breadcrumbs. So, to do this just enable its checkbox by clicking on it. The default settings are good and should work for you but you can always follow your choice. After this, save changes.

Step 2: Edit your theme’s PHP files

After you have enabled breadcrumbs in WordPress (Yoast SEO Plugin) settings, you have to put a small piece of PHP code in your theme’s PHP files.

Copy the code Below:

<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
yoast_breadcrumb('<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>');
} ?>

Now navigate to Appearance -> Editor

In almost all cases, the file you need to edit is single.php so breadcrumbs can show up in your posts.

single php editing for breadcrumbs

Paste the code you copied before in your file. Preferably you should paste it after the #content div ends. See the Image Below:

yoast editing php file for breadcrumbs

Thats it. You are Done. If you want to add breadcrumbs in your pages too (like about, contact etc) then edit those files also just like this.

Even if till now you haven’t implemented breadcrumbs in your website, then what are you waiting for? Still not convinced? Then you must see All about WordPress Breadcrumbs and SEO. it looks good, helps user and takes little time. Good Luck! Ask your questions in comments below.

About Asim

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Asim is a blogger who enjoys writing articles on Technology and Blogging niche. He is our Gold Star Contributor.