Add Yoast Breadcrumbs

This tutorial features the Feast Plugin, which contains theme enhancements.

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.

Jump to:

• Feast Plugin's "Add Yoast Breadcrumbs"
• Configure Yoast breadcrumbs
• Disabling Yoast breadcrumbs
• Breadcrumbs on category pages
• Genesis breadcrumbs
• Manually adding Yoast breadcrumbs
• 💬 Comments

Feast Plugin's "Add Yoast Breadcrumbs"

Update: as of 4.0.9, we automatically disable Genesis breadcrumbs for you, when you activate Yoast breadcrumbs through the plugin.

The Add Yoast Breadcrumbs toggle in the Feast Plugin automatically inserts breadcrumbs above the post title, providing:

1. An easy way for your readers to find related recipes by navigating to the parent category
2. 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.

Configure Yoast breadcrumbs

You'll still need to configure the Yoast breadcrumbs per our recommend settings in the SEO for food bloggers post.

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

Breadcrumbs on category pages

According to Casey Markee, breadcrumbs on categories have not been shown to be a useful user experience, and provide little to no internal linking benefit.

We don't recommend or support displaying breadcrumbs on categories.

Genesis breadcrumbs

Genesis has its own breadcrumbs implementation, which will create two lines of breadcrumbs. We recommend disabling the Genesis breadcrumbs, as the Yoast implementation is better, allowing for specifying of the "parent category".

Note: as of Genesis 3.1.0, Genesis automatically disables its own schema and relies on Yoast for schema, but doesn't disable its own breadcrumbs.

To disable Genesis breadcrumbs, go to Customize > Theme Settings > Breadcrumbs and ensure all the boxes are disabled.

Another possible source of duplicate breadcrumbs is from bloggers or developers who have already manually added the Yoast Breadcrumbs code to their site. Possible sources are:

• Theme files (especially functions.php)
• Code snippets plugin
• Feast Customizations plugin (now outdated - migrate to Code snippets plugin)
• Genesis simple hooks plugin

Manually adding Yoast breadcrumbs

If using the Feast Plugin, this is unnecessary.

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.