Navigation is a key component of your website. Without it, visitors would struggle to find your content and access your pages. Planning out your navigation is often the hardest part. You have to figure out what pages you want, the order they appear in and the best way to name each item.
Thankfully, once you’ve worked out what your navigation is, WordPress makes it easy to add the menus and you can be set up in a matter of minutes.
Today, I’m going to show exactly how to set up a menu in WordPress and the additional options available to you.
LET’S GET STARTED…
Head over to the left-hand menu on your WordPress admin area and go to ‘Appearance > Menus’.
On the menu page, you can add a new menu or edit an existing menu. To create a new menu, enter the ‘Menu Name’, then click the blue ‘Create Menu’ button.
Now that you have created your menu, you’ll need to assign it to a theme location. The locations will be based on your theme but typically you will have ‘primary’ and ‘footer’ options available. Tick the box beside your chosen location and click on ‘Save Menu’.
Additionally, in the menu settings you will see a tick box for ‘Automatically add new top-level pages to this menu’. This option can be selected if you would like main menu items to be automatically added to the navigation when you add new pages. If left unchecked you will have to manually add any new pages to the menu.
The next step is to add the pages to your new menu. On the left-hand side of the menu page, you will see drop-down boxes with options for:
- Pages – Allowing you to select the pages on your website e.g About, Services, Content
- Posts – You can add your blog posts
- Custom Links – This option can be used to add links to external websites.
- Categories – Your blog categories
Under each of these sections you’ll find a list of the available pages, posts, and categories that can be added to your menu.
Select the tick box beside your chosen page and click the ‘Add to Menu’ button. Your selections will now be visible on the right-hand side under the ‘Menu Structure’.
You can now re-order the menu items into a particular order by simply dragging the item into place. If you would like to add certain items as a drop down, drag the page under the main page and over to the right.
After you’ve finished arranging your menu items, click the ‘Save Menu’ button and open up your website to see your new menu.
ADDITIONAL MENU SETTINGS
Within WordPress, there are a number of additional menu settings that you can use to configure your menus further.
By default these options aren’t shown, however, you can access them by clicking on the ‘Screen Options’ button at the top right side of the page. Within the options panel, you can select the elements that you would like to configure and add to your menu settings.
BOXES
As well as the Pages, Posts, Custom Links and Categories, you can tick to show the Tags and Format sections on your menu settings.
SHOW ADVANCED MENU PROPERTIES
To really get the most out of your WordPress menu, you can select a few additional options to be added to the menu settings.
- Link Target – This allows you to choose whether the menu item opens in a new window.
- Title Attribute – You can add a descriptive name to the link.
- CSS Classes – If you would like to style a particular link with CSS you can enter the class name.
- Link Relationship (XFN) – Allows you to state the relationship between the link and the other website. For XFN examples, check out the WordPress documentation.
- Description – You can add a description to the link but this will only be shown if your theme supports it.
After selecting from the ‘Screen Options’ you can configure the settings by clicking the arrow beside each menu item. The new settings will now be visible.
You can add multiple menus to your website and assign them to the available theme locations and to your widgets.
