It’s time for another Jargon Buster and this month we are going to do our best to explain what the term “breadcrumbs” means in the context of a website.
Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a phrase used to describe a part of the user interface (fancy term for the nicely designed page you interact with on a website) to make it easy for you to navigate around the site. Breadcrumbs can be implemented across a variety of platforms such as operating systems and software programmes but in this Jargon Buster we will just be looking at how they are used on a website.
Breadcrumbs display the path that someone has taken to arrive on a certain page of a website and allow users to retrace their steps and click on a previous page adding another level of navigation to a website. The name for this was almost certainly inspired by the classic tale of Hansel and Gretel who left a trail of breadcrumbs in the woods so that they were able to follow and escape to freedom. Breadcrumbs on a website are particularly helpful on larger websites with pages located in a deep menu structure.
If you look directly above the heading of this news post you should see we have implemented breadcrumbs on our own website too allowing you to easily navigate back to our main news feed and also the home page. Elements like this on your website really help improve the user experience and help people to easily identify how they arrived at a particular area of your website.