Yoast Breadcrumbs – WordPress Breadcrumbs

This plugin allows you to add breadcrumbs to your theme. Why you should do this is outlined in my WordPress SEO article. In short though, breadcrumbs provide a way for the user to easily navigate up and down your site, from post, to category, to the next post, or from child page, to parent page etc. It also allows search engines to more easily understand the structure of your site.

These WordPress breadcrumbs could for instance look like this:

Which Google in turn would display as:

As you can see, having proper breadcrumbs here makes it easier for the user and gives you an advantage in the search results pages!

Installation of WordPress Breadcrumbs

1. Download the plugin
2. Unzip the package and upload the file to your WordPress installation’s plugins folder
3. Enable the plugin
4. Adjust any settings you want under Settings -> Breadcrumbs
5. Add the following code to your theme’s template(s):

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

Advanced use of WordPress Breadcrumbs

If you want to do a bit more with the output of the plugin, use the following code:

<?php if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) {
	$breadcrumbs = yoast_breadcrumb("","",false);
} ?>

That will output the breadcrumb into a variable, for you to play with.

WordPress Breadcrumbs Variables

This plugin takes the following variables:

$prefix
The code that your breadcrumb should be prefixed with. Default to an empty string.

$suffix
The code that should be added on the back of your breadcrumb. Default to an empty string.

$display
If set to false, will return the breadcrumb path instead of echo-ing it. Defaults to true.