Understanding Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are the small trail of links usually shown near the top of a page — for example Home > About Us > Safeguarding — that show a visitor where they are within the site and let them jump back to any level above. They’re generated automatically, but it helps to understand where they come from so pages display sensibly.

Where breadcrumbs come from

Breadcrumbs are built automatically from the page’s position in the site structure — specifically, its parent page chain (see the article on setting page order and parent/child pages). If “Safeguarding” has “About Us” set as its parent, and “About Us” has no parent, the breadcrumb trail reads Home > About Us > Safeguarding without you needing to set anything separately.

For Posts, breadcrumbs are usually built from the category the post is filed under, rather than a parent page, since Posts don’t have parent pages in the same way.

Why breadcrumbs might look wrong

• Missing or unexpected middle step — usually means the page’s Parent Page setting doesn’t match where you’d expect it to sit. Check Page Attributes on the page in question.
• Post breadcrumb showing an unexpected category — if a post has more than one category assigned, the breadcrumb typically follows whichever is set as the primary one; check the Categories panel on the post.
• Breadcrumb missing entirely — some templates (particularly custom landing pages) intentionally hide breadcrumbs; this isn’t usually a fault.

What you don’t need to do

There’s no separate field for typing out a breadcrumb trail by hand — it’s generated from the page structure automatically, so the fix for an incorrect breadcrumb is almost always adjusting the Parent Page (for pages) or Category (for posts), rather than looking for a breadcrumb-specific setting.

Tips

• If you’re restructuring pages and notice the breadcrumb trail change, that’s expected — it’s simply reflecting the new parent chain.
• Keep page nesting sensible and shallow (see the parent/child pages article) and breadcrumbs will generally look after themselves.
• If a breadcrumb looks broken in a way that doesn’t match the page’s Parent or Category settings, get in touch — that would point to a template issue rather than a content one.