In a website, menus are the set of content filter links generally placed horizontally at the top of a website for providing easy navigation. A Menu shows what you are offering in your website. For example: If you are running a blog on recipes then you can use navigation for offering various dish types like separate menus for dishes, soups, deserts, fast foods, detox meals etc. In this tutorial we will guide you to WordPress Menu system covering all important tasks and using the built-in menu editor.
Different themes provides you different menu locations and by default in most WordPress themes page links are used in navigation menu locations. The reason is most WordPress users create a simple blogging site with pages like: About, Contact and Home i.e. your blog page. Hence everything gets done automatically.
But WordPress allows you to create custom menus containing links to pages, categories and other custom links. So if you don’t want to display page links in menu location then create menus and assign them to display on a menu location (which your theme provides you).
How To Create Your First WordPress Menu?
[heading size=”17″]Step-1: Creating New Menus[/heading]
For creating your first WordPress menu, login to your WordPress admin area (yourdomain.com/wp-admin) then navigate to Appearance -> Menus page, click ‘create a new menu‘ link, give your menu a name (this is not visible on the frontend) and click ‘Create Menu‘ link.
[heading size=”17″]Step-2: Adding Menu Items[/heading]
After the menu is created, you can add menu items from the left column to menu structure box. Example: For adding a custom link:
- Click ‘Links’ (on left column)
- Type of paste the link
- Type link text
- Click ‘Add to Menu‘ button.
[heading size=”17″]Step-3: Creating Multilevel Menus[/heading]
After creating navigation links, you can drag-drop to reorder them. You can make navigation go deep by adding submenus. For adding a submenu, simply drag and place a menu item a little bit right to its parent as shown in the given screenshot.
Here are the steps to create sub menus:
- Position your mouse over the ‘child’ menu item.
- While still holding your left mouse button, drag it to the right and release the mouse button.
- You can repeat these steps for each sub-menu item then click the Save Menu button visible in your Menu Editor.
[heading size=”17″]Step-4: Set Menu Location[/heading]
After the menu structure is created, assign it to a theme location. Scroll down to the ‘Menu Settings‘ section and choose a theme location.
[heading size=”17″]Step-5: See How It Looks[/heading]
Visit the your website’s home and see how it looks like. Given screenshot shows the menu we have created in top primary location of Twenty Fourteen WordPress theme.
How To Manage Multiple Menus?
You can create a number of menus, assign them to different locations. Like if you are using default Twenty Fourteen then you can add a menu on the top of you website, another menu in left sidebar’s vertical menu location. WordPress also provides you a menu widget (in Appearance -> Widgets page) you can use for manually displaying any menu in your sidebar or footer widget area.
For managing your menus, menu items, their structure and location, visit Appearance -> Menus page and select a menu to edit. Another tab with title ‘Manage Locations‘ allows you to manage menu locations in bulk.