There is no denying the fact that Navigation is an important element of a blog design as without an effective navigation path, a user may feel lost. A smooth navigation helps enhancing the usability of a site as it allows them to find the required information. Providing the right support to a blog’s navigation and aiding the users to locate their whereabouts on it, Breadcrumbs are considered quite useful and are therefore much utilized.
In a blog particularly, which contains a large amount of content, Breadcrumbs help users locate the information and are found to be useful in the following ways:
Act as secondary navigation
They offer convenience to the users to reach directly the specific pages or categories on a blog and thus aid them navigate the blog. It is an important factor for a user friendly blog is bound to gain readers’ favorability. By increasing the usability, breadcrumb navigation creates a positive impact upon the users.
Limits users’ efforts
Breadcrumbs reduce the number of steps that users may have to take as they no longer need to move back and forth, rather use Breadcrumbs to reach the desired destination. They thus, save the time of the readers.
Help identify the user’s location
This is a major advantage of using breadcrumbs which prevent users from feeling lost on the site. With the use of Breadcrumbs, a user can easily locate his current position on the blog.
Support Categorization of Posts
If blog content is such that it needs to be categorized in order to make it user friendly, breadcrumbs can provide the required support. There is no need to make separate pages for different categories as breadcrumbs can serve the purpose by displaying the various levels.
Aid SEO
Breadcrumbs play a significant role in internal linking. By using relevant keywords in anchor text, various internal pages on the blog can be linked. Such an internal linking structure helps search engine spiders to know about the content.
Having seen the advantages, now we are going to mention some excellent WordPress Breadcrumb Plugins that can be used to offer a friendly experience to the users of your WordPress Blog.
1- Breadcrumb NavXT
An excellent WordPress plugin, Breadcrumb NavXT allows generating Breadcrumb trails and best feature is these trails can be customized to suit the requirements of the blog or site. Its administrative interface is also quite friendly.
2- Yoast Breadcrumbs
Another popular WordPress plugin allowing addition of breadcrumbs to a theme or template, it is also compatible with supported WordPress frameworks. Yoast Breadcrumbs currently supports Thematic, Hybrid, Thesis and WP framework.
3- Breadcrumbs Plus
The Plugin allows an easy way to add Breadcrumb menu to a blog or site and assists the visitors to get back to the previous pages from their current location. Breadcrumbs Plugins can be localized for English, French, Italian, Spanish and Polish languages and currently supports Hybrid, Thesis, Genesis, Nifty and Thematic frameworks.
4- Simple Crumbs
As the name suggests, the plugin can be used to generate breadcrumbs for various pages on a WordPress blog and the posts present on them. It is required to use Permalinks for Simple Crumbs plugin.
5- Breadcrumb Trail
Add a Breadcrumb menu in a simple way to your WordPress Theme by installing this plugin. However, the plugin requires 3.1 or higher WordPress version.
6- WordPress Breadcrumbs
A simple plugin, WordPress Breadcrumbs allows adding breadcrumbs to a WordPress theme and thus can be used to enhance the navigation of your blog.
7- Simple Breadcrumbs For WordPress
The plugin comes handy to lend breadcrumb navigation to the pages and the various posts on your blog. The best part of this plugin is that it takes very less time and is easy to use.
8- BreadCrumb NavXT Widget
This plugin provides the required help for those using Breadcrumb NavXT by providing the widget support. It creates widgets for the breadcrumbs for users to include them in the side.
9- BP Breadcrumbs
The plugin offers a simple way of adding breadcrumb trail navigation to a BuddyPress Installation.
With the help of these plugins, you can now have breadcrumb navigation to your WordPress blog and offer a pleasant experience to your users.
We look forward to your comments and feedback.
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