Since Navigation menu guide your visitors to important sections of your website, it is the most important design element on any page.
In most wordpress themes, this menu is placed as a horizontal menu close to the header. Of course, the menu location can vary depending on your theme and some themes support more than one menu locations.
When you install wordpress, it automatically creates a default Navigation menu. This menu contains a list of your top-level pages. It’s generally a bad idea to include a list of all page titles in menu. Keep your Navigation Short and List the Most Important Pages First.
Fortunately wordPress provides a user friendly interface which let you add and manage any any page including category and tag archives, posts, pages and custom links.
- Step 1:Login to the WordPress Dashboard.
- Step 2: From the ‘Appearance’ menu on the left-hand side of the Dashboard, select the ‘Menus’ option to bring up the Menu Editor.
- Step 3: Create Your Navigation Menu
- Step 4: Assign Your Menu To The Desired Location
Step 2
This menu page is going to look something like image below.
There are two tabs on this page Edit Menus and Manage Locations. Click on Edit Menu tab first.
If your theme already has a default menu, you can skip ‘Create Menu’ step and begin Add / edit menu items. If your theme doesn’t have a menu, click Create a Menu link instead.
Step 3: Create a Menu
- Enter a name for your new menu in the Menu Name box
- Click the Create Menu button.
Adding Items to a Menu
You can add different link types into your menu. Choose items like Posts, Pages, custom links, and categories, from the left column to add to the menu.
- For example, locate the pane entitled Pages. Go ahead and click the down arrow.
- Within this pane, you have an option to select from
most recent pages. If the page you want to add is not in the most recent pages, select the View All link to bring up a list of all the currently published Pages on your site, or you can click the Search option to search for a page. Here I’m going to pick from ‘Most Recent ‘pages.
- Select the Pages that you want to add by clicking the checkbox next to each Page’s title.
- Click the Add to Menu button located at the bottom of this pane to add your selection(s) to the menu that you created in the previous step.
- Click the Save Menu( or Create Menu) button once you’ve added all the menu items you want.
Your custom menu has now been saved. Repeat same steps to add Post & Categories to your Menu.
Adding external links as menu item: Sometimes you need to add a link that is not part of your pages or posts. For example add a link directly to another site/webpage. To do this Click on the pane entitled Custom Links. Enter the URL and title you want for the menu item, and click “Add to Menu.”
Save your menu after all changes are made. Visit the homepage of your site to see the menu in action. You might want to edit menu labels or you want to re arrange menu items.
Click here to see how to add drop down menu items
Edit / Remove/Re arrange Items in a Menu
Click ‘down’ arrow in the top right-hand corner of the each item to reveal additional configuration options.
- Edit Label to change wording of the text in the menu bar.
By default, the menu “label” will be the page name (or post name, etc) - To remove the menu item, click the red “Remove” text.
- To Change the order of menu items in the menu bar, click on links next to ‘Move’. (Alternately, you can drag and drop items to reorder the menu bar. See image below ).
Save your menu after all changes are made. Visit the homepage of your site to see the menu in action. You might want to edit menu labels or you want to re arrange menu items.
Setting Menu location
- Click on the Manage Locations tab on the Menus page.
- You can see a page similar to above. Note: This page content may look different depending on your Theme. In my theme, I’ve one menu location called ‘Primary Menu’. You may have more than one menu locations(eg. primary menu, side menu, footer menu) and your menu location use another name like ‘top menu’ , sidebar menu’ etc.
Creating Sub Menu Items (Drop Down Menu ) in WordPress
To create the drop down menu, simply use the drag and drop feature . First you add menu items you want to be displayed within the dropdown list (refer adding menu items section above). After you have done, drag the menu items to their parent menu.
Here, for example, we have taken PhotoShop , Webdesign and Windows under the parent menu Tutorials .
Then added Sub-Sub-Menu Html and CSS under the sub menu Webdesign .
After you are satisfied with the settings, click on Save Menu.