WordPress: Adding Breadcrumbs Using Yoast SEO Plugin

As previously covered in our article, WordPress: Creating Breadcrumbs without a Plugin.Breadcrumbs are a navigational technique displaying all visited pages leading from the home page to the currently viewed page. All pages are linked for easy backwards navigation. Typically this is placed near the top of a web page. So for example, if you look to the top of this page you will see the breadcrumb navigation menu that leads a path back to the homepage.

To find out more about breadcrumbs and their benefits, see our article: What are breadcrumbs and why do we need them?

ebay-breadcrumb-example

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO (formerly known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) is the most used WordPress SEO plugin for WordPress.org users today. It includes many great features for optimising your website for search engines. Features include a snippet editor and real time page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps and breadcrumbs!

You may also like: WordPress: Creating Breadcrumbs without a Plugin

Adding the breadcrumbs to your website

If you haven’t already, you will need to install the WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you currently use another SEO plugin, there might be some conflicts between the plugins if both enabled. It’s advised that you don’t have both SEO plugins running on your website. This does of course mean that you will need to complete the setup to ensure you don’t lose your titles and meta descriptions etc. There are options for exporting and importing your SEO settings into Yoast.

Step 1: Enable Breadcrumbs

To enable the breadcrumb feature simply go to: SEO > Advanced > Breadcrumbs Tab in the WordPress admin. Tick the “Enable Breadcrumbs” and complete the settings as appropriate.

yoast-seo-enable-breadcrumbs

Step 2: Edit your template

Next you need to open the theme editor (Appearance > Editor) and find the PHP template file you want the breadcrumbs to display, it should usually be “header.php”.

If you have some knowledge of HTML or website coding, you should have no problem identifying where to add the code. If you are completely lost and have no knowledge, you might need some help with this part. More information can be found here.

Add the following code where you want your breadcrumbs to display:

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

This can also be done using an FTP client, downloading the PHP file and opening in a text editor, adding the code in then re-uploading the PHP file to your server.

And you’re done. A simple way to add breadcrumbs to your website!