This tutorial features the Feast Plugin, which enhances and extends your theme to improve SEO, pagespeed, accessibility and user experience.
Yoast has a feature which enables adding breadcrumb schema to your website, creating a more complete schema graph, which search engines love. For the full writeup, see: Yoast SEO Breadcrumbs
However, due to different setups with different themes, Yoast is unable to automatically insert its own breadcrumbs into a theme, so it relies on the user (or developer) to implement breadcrumbs using code.
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Feast Plugin's "Add Yoast Breadcrumbs"
The Add Yoast Breadcrumbs toggle in the Feast Plugin automatically inserts breadcrumbs above the post title, providing:
- An easy way for your readers to find related recipes by navigating to the parent category
- An additional backlink for search engines to follow, enabling them to better understand your site structure
Both of these are great to have, and we highly recommend having breadcrumbs enabled.
NOTE: Breadcrumbs must be enabled in Yoast's settings at SEO > Search Appearance > Breadcrumbs > Enabled.
Rather than needing to edit theme files or create custom code snippets, then having to monitor for updates and changes to breadcrumbs over time, simply enable the "Add Yoast Breadcrumbs" and we'll manage it on your behalf.
Note: as of 4.0.9, we automatically disable Genesis breadcrumbs for you, when you activate Yoast breadcrumbs through the plugin.
Configure Yoast breadcrumbs
You'll still need to configure the Yoast breadcrumbs per our recommend settings in the SEO for food bloggers post.
Enhancements
In the Feast Plugin 6.2.9, we've added two settings to optimize the breadcrumbs:
The Remove current page title from Breadcrumbs will remove the unnecessary display of the post/page title, because the title displays directly below the breadcrumbs.
The Hide breadcrumbs on pages without a parent will prevent breadcrumbs from displaying when there's no parent pages to link back to, which essentially just duplicates the page title and looks bad.
These are recommended settings and should be enabled for all sites.
Add the recipe index
You can now add your recipe index as a part of the breadcrumbs:
The Recipe Index URL gets added between the "Home" link and the primary category. This helps readers navigate to the Modern Recipe Index, which visually displays your categories:
IMPORTANT: Make sure you've configured your Yoast breadcrumbs to add the "Home" link.
This has been tested and is valid breadcrumb schema. It will be added to all breadcrumbs on posts that contain a recipe card.
This is available as of version 6.4.8.
Disabling Yoast breadcrumbs
Version 4.4.1 of the Feast Plugin includes an option to disable Yoast breadcrumbs on a per-post or per-page basis.
This is useful when building pages that don't require breadcrumbs, such as:
- Modern Homepage
- Modern Recipe Index
- Contact
- About
- Subscribe
Note that in most cases, using the following setting will achieve the same result with less work:
Breadcrumbs on category pages
As of the Feast Plugin v.6.7.0 we've added breadcrumbs to category pages.
This is because breadcrumb structured data is added to category pages regardless of whether they're displayed or not, however, Google guidelines on structured data requires that structured data must not be added if it's not visible to users on the page:
As a user experience, the breadcrumbs help readers navigate to the recipe index or home page.
While we don't recommend or support nested/sub categories, this also provides navigation to parent-categories for sites that have set this up in the past.
Thanks Nerdpress and Mediawyse and TopHatRank for feedback
Genesis breadcrumbs
While the Feast Plugin will automatically disable Genesis breadcrumbs for you, they can still appear on sites which have manually added the Yoast Breadcrumbs code to their site. Possible sources are:
- Theme files (especially functions.php)
- Code snippets plugin
- Genesis simple hooks plugin
Manually adding Yoast breadcrumbs
If using the Feast Plugin, this is unnecessary - simply enable the "Add Yoast Breadcrumbs".
We don't recommend manually adding breadcrumbs.
If you're technically inclined and want to add something else you need to maintain and update over time, you can manually add the breadcrumbs to your theme using the code provided by Yoast:
<?php
if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) { yoast_breadcrumb( '<p id="breadcrumbs">','</p>' ); }
?>
Note: You'll need to hook this to the correct location in your theme using add_action or add_filter. We recommend add this to the code snippets plugin rather than the theme files.
Brandy says
I don't use Yoast because it conflicted with something else that I was using and instead chose another SEO plugin (RankMath). I have left Genesis breadcrumbs enabled but the title of the post is always awkwardly underneath the breadcrumbs. Is there a fix for this? I know there must be.
Skylar says
Sorry, due to the huge range of potential conflicts with different plugins, we only offer support for a limited number of configurations. RankMath is not a recommend or support plugin. You'll need to get support from RankMath directly.
David says
So I now have Genesis breadcrumbs enabled, then have selected "enable Yoast breadcrumbs" in feast, and enabled the Yoast breadcrumbs. Should I be leaving the Yoast breadcrumb settings to the default options Yoast gives. (e.g. "none" for posts, category, tag, format). This page leads me to think maybe the Feast plugin is automatically taking care of how the setup should work, but I'm not sure. Thanks!
Skylar says
The plugin only takes care of the technical implementation - you still need to configure the Yoast settings per our post at https://feastdesignco.com/seo-for-food-bloggers/#yoast-seo-plugin
David says
Thanks Skylar!
cam says
I'm curious, I just enabled the bread crumbs to show up on my posts, but when I go to each recipe, it is only showing that each post comes from Home < Post and its not including the category the post is categorized under. Is there something I'm mising?
Skylar says
It sounds like you need to configure them: https://feastdesignco.com/seo-for-food-bloggers/
aleka shunk says
I do not have a general "recipe index", instead I have an "appetizer index", "snack index" and "dessert index", what URL would I need to copy and paste? Or should I change this so all of these categories fall under one "recipe index"?
Skylar says
I can't make any real suggestions without seeing your site so I'd recommend submitting a support ticket.
Based just on what you've described, your "appetizer index" should be (or is) just a category, which should go onto the actual recipe index.
This is a recipe index: https://feastdesignco.com/modern-recipe-index/
Dannii Martin says
All my recipe posts have the correct breadcrumb structure: home>recipes>category.
However, I also have non-recipe posts that are showing the same, even though the categories that they are in have no parent. For example, my wellbeing category has no parent, so why is "recipes" still in the breadcrumbs?
Many thanks.
Skylar says
Per the instructions above, this featured should only be used if 100% of the site is dedicated to recipes. If your site has a "wellbeing" category that isn't recipes, then don't insert the recipe index into the URLs.
There are ways to fine-tune this by category but you need to hire a developer.
We don't offer this because the optimal user experience is a website 100% dedicated to recipes.
Louise Dam says
How can I translate the word 'Recipes' when I add the recipe index to my breadcrumbs?
Thanks!
/Louise
Skylar says
At this time there's no translation support. I'll put it on the to-do list but I can't provide any timeline.
Alex says
When I originally set up my site, I created a "recipes" parent category, with all of my recipe types as sub-categories. I realize that isn't the way it should have been done, but at this point, I don't want to change it and break those links. Because of this though, the breadcrumbs on the first page of each category show as "Home > Recipes > Recipes". Once you move to page 2 of the category, the breadcrumbs change to "Home > Recipes > Muffins" (for example). Is there a way to fix the first page of each category, or am I stuck with it like that?