Component

Breadcrumbs

Also known as: Breadcrumb trail

A list of links showing the location of the current page in the navigational hierarchy.

51 Examples

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  • Breadcrumbs

    A11Y Style Guide

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    • jQuery

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    Ant Design

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    Atlassian Design System

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    Aurora

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  • Breadcrumb

    Backpack

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    Base Web

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    Blueprint

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    • Sass

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    Bolt Design System

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    • Twig
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    Bootstrap

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    Bulma

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    Carbon Design System

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    Cauldron

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    Cedar

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    Chakra UI

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    Coral

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    Decathlon Design System

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    Dell Design System

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    eBay MIND Patterns

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    eBay Playbook

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    Elastic UI framework

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  • Breadcrumbs (You are here)

    Elisa Design System

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    Flowbite

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    Fluent UI

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    giffgaff design system

  • Breadcrumbs

    GOLD Design System

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    GOV.UK Design System

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    • Nunjucks

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    Helios

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    Instructure-UI

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    Jøkul Designsystem

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    Lightning Design System

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    Luna

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    Mozilla Protocol

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    Nessie

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    NewsKit

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    NHS Digital service manual

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    ONS Design System

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    • Nunjucks
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    Orbit

    Tech

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    Pajamas

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    PatternFly

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    Pharos

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    Quasar Framework

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    • Vue

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    Ruter Components

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    • React

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    SEB Design Library

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    shadcn/ui

    Tech

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  • Breadcrumbs

    Spectrum

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    Stacks

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    • Stimulus

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    uStyle

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    Visa Product Design System

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    W3C design system

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    West Midlands Network Design System

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    • HTML
    • Nunjucks
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  • Breadcrumbs

    Workday Canvas Design System

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    • React

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Description

Breadcrumbs (or a ‘breadcrumb trail’) are a form of navigation, consisting of a list of links arranged in a hierarchical or chronological order. Their purpose is to help users keep track of their location by showing the position of the current page in one of the following contexts:

  • the structural hierarchy of the site’s pages;
  • the categories of the current page;

You may also find examples of websites that use breadcrumbs to show the history of all the pages the user has visited in their current session, but this seems to be far less common. For the sake of this article, I will focus on the first two contexts: representing page structure; and representing nested categories.

Layout

The most common place for a breadcrumbs component to appear is before the main content of a page1. It’s usual to see a progression from least specific (the highest-level page or least specific category) to most specific category. The highest level page may be the homepage or the root of the current section.

Breadcrumbs from the documentation site for Gatsby JS.
The breadcrumbs on the documentation site for Gatsby JS represent the structural hierarchy with the homepage on the left and the current page on the right. Items are separated using an SVG arrow icon.
Breadcrumbs from the website Serious Eats.
The breadcrumbs on the recipe site Serious Eats represent a taxonomy based on ingredients. Items are separated using a forward slash.

Separation of breadcrumb items is usually indicated with either: a greater-than symbol (>), a forward slash (/), or a similar-looking icon.

Markup

For a page at the URL, example.com/parent-page/current-page the markup could look like this:

<nav aria-label="Breadcrumbs">
  <ol>
    <li>
      <a href="/">Homepage</a>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a href="/parent-page">Parent page</a>
    </li>
    <li aria-current="page">Current page</li>
  </ol>
</nav>

Notes:

  • As breadcrumbs are a type of navigation you should put them in a <nav> element.
  • The order of the items in a breadcrumb list is important: use an ordered list (<ol>) with an <li> for each breadcrumb item.
  • Add a meaningful label such as aria-label="Breadcrumbs" to the <nav> element. This helps differentiate it from any other navigation landmarks in the current document, such as the primary navigation.2
  • Add the aria-current="page" attribute to the item which represents the current page.

Usage guidelines

Breadcrumbs work best for websites based around a hierarchical structure, such as documentation or e-commerce websites. If everything is on a single level (e.g. posts on a blog), there’s no point.

Footnotes

  1. WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices 1.1 ↩

  2. Accessible Breadcrumb Navigation Pattern — Scott O’Hara ↩

Resources

  • Breadcrumb

    Open UI

  • Breadcrumb Guidelines

    By Tess Gadd

    Balsamiq

Name distribution