Breadcrumb Navigation
The path at the top of a page showing where it sits: home, then category, then subcategory, then here.
Analogy Mental model
The trail of breadcrumbs in the story, which tells you both how you arrived and where in the forest you currently stand.
In practice What you actually do
Essential on any site with depth. Mark it up as BreadcrumbList so the results page shows a readable path, shoes then running, instead of a long parameterised URL. It occupies a line of the listing and makes the structure legible at a glance.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Breadcrumbs should follow how the site is organised rather than how the database happens to store it. Every level except the current page must be a working link, otherwise the crumb is decoration rather than navigation.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →