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
• Enhancements
• Add the recipe index
• Disabling Yoast breadcrumbs
• Breadcrumbs on category pages
• Genesis breadcrumbs
• Manually adding Yoast breadcrumbs

Feast Plugin's "Add Yoast Breadcrumbs"

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.

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:

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, so we only recommend using it on sites that have 100% of posts dedicated to recipes.

This should only be used with the "Hide breadcrumbs on pages without a parent" setting above, otherwise you'll have your pages link to the recipe index.

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

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

While the Feast Plugin will automatically disable Genesis breadcrumbs for you, they can still appear on sites which have already 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.

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.