Adding Breadcrumbs to a Rails Application

Summary

Helping users navigate through our site with ease helps them reach their desired destination thus improving their experience within our application. Breadcrumbs play a crucial part in this: they give users a clear idea of where they are and provide them a path to reach In this article, we will learn how to add breadcrumbs to a Rails app using the different types of breadcrumbs and way to add them in Rails applications. Let's start by seeing why breadcrumbs are important. If you're already familiar with the jump to the adding breadcrumbs to Rails apps section Why breadcrumbs? The main reason to add breadcrumbs to any application is to improve user experience: they give a clear indication of where the user is on the page and the navigation paths that can be taken from there on. They can help users reach a desired outcome faster without the need to know anything about our site beforehand while lowering the bounce rate at the same time. Besides this user experience improvement, breadcrumbs show up in search results to give a quick glance of what a site contains Search engines also love breadcrumbs because they help them figure out how our sites are structured and use them to improve the way they crawl our sites. As an added bonus, good user experience in the form of engagement, lower bounce rates, and time spent on our site are ranking factors so, producing a good navigation experience can help get more organic traffic. Breadcrumbs got their name from "Hansel and Gretel”, a popular fairy tale narrating the story about two siblings that are lost in the forest where one of them drops small pieces of bread along the path to help them find their way back home through the forest. Types of breadcrumbs There are roughly three types of breadcrumbs, and we should pick one depending on the needs of our users: the goal should be to make navigation faster and more efficient: Hierarchical These follow the site structure hierarchically with the home page, or other relevant sections, ...