We know that breadcrumb designing is a kind of navigation scheme and mostly used on e-commerce websites. On e-commerce websites we have to manage the navigation of numerous product/service pages along with categories and sub categories. Therefore, chances are higher that visitors will be lost during the journey, whether coming from the home page or directly to the landing pages through referrals or organic search.
There are three types of breadcrumb links, location-based, path-based, and attribute-based. Whatever they may be, they contribute greatly in e-commerce website navigation of all kinds, be it desktop version or responsive mobile version. Let’s check some important benefits of breadcrumb navigation in web designing in modern concepts.
Breadcrumb links enable task completion easily for visitors who come for the first time or repeated, as it offers more options to explore the website hierarchy up and down without losing their locations in a large scale website or web portal. Location based breadcrumbs are highly appropriate for most of the categories of websites or e-commerce storefronts.
Support Usability
Breadcrumbs are offering effectiveness in terms of task completion and efficiency in terms of quickness and ease to achieve the goals of the website. It is said that the 30% users see the breadcrumb links situated just below the main page title/header through peripheral vision. This helps them to locate their present location in website page hierarchy.
Support Content Findability
It is true that breadcrumbs links encourage further browsing of a web store or website, as users have multiple options to explore through links in the breadcrumb path. Visitors have obvious chances to jump directly to any category or product without fear of losing themselves in the web pages. Another benefit of breadcrumb in SERP results of Google or other search engines is that you can show breadcrumb links using Rich snippets markup on your web page using microdot or RDFa markups.
Provide Information Scent
On a web page information scent contains textual and visual cues in order to:
- facilitate clear navigation so your users can know where to go
- allow you to get quick orientation so users can know where they are
- know the actions they take such as whether they should click the link or not and what will happen if they do so
Provide Content Where About
In the case of location based breadcrumbs, you will find the entire hierarchy of the navigation begins with the home page and traversed through categories, sub categories, and sub-sub categories. This ultimately gives enough clues about the current page and its relevancy with top hierarchy. Based on breadcrumb links, our visitors can know about the content and their contexts in hierarchy. The same is true for the bots, as search engines can determine the contextual relevancy of the content of the page and consider it in ranking.
Images: ”Website template design menu navigation elements/ Shutterstock.com“
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