In this section you will learn how to create your navigation menus inside your WordPress website. You need to create navigation menus easy to understand so that your visitors will be able to know where to “click” to find the information they want. So take care of your menus and make them clear and easy to use. But let’s start with the basics:
What is a wordpress menu ?
Since you have created posts, pages and categories, you need to have them well organized inside your website to help your visitors easily find what they want inside your website. For example, in our website you can see our top menu in this screenshot:
Under the logo area you can see one menu. As you can see, a menu is a set of some elements (page,categories or subcategories etc) you just created and you want them to be displayed somewhere in your website. You can create also menus in the sidebar.
So menus are very important for your website design but you need to know how to set them properly. It’s not difficult but this depends to the theme you have selected to build your website. Some themes support menus and make it very easy to build menus like that you see in the screenshot, some of them don’t support menus and make this process more hard to implement.
How to create menus in WordPress ?
Visiting your dashboard, you go under the “Appearance” section and you click to “Menus” as shown in the picture below:
Since you click there you will be redirected to your main WordPress menu area as shown in the picture below (click image to enlarge):
This is the area where you set your WordPress menus. So, the first thing you should do is to click “create a new menu” and name your menu. The name of the menu will appear on the top ( in this example: how to create a website) Then you need to add elements to your menu that will be displayed in this menu. The elements you have created (categories, pages) will be displayed in the left column. In the right column, you can create the menus.
Put elements to your menu
So , what you have to do is to click to the elements you want (categories or pages) and then click “add to menu” Then you will see these elements inside the menu on the right column. You can change the order of the elements just by drag and drop. You can set the element you want to appear first, second, third etc. . .
You can also set here the drop down feature. For example as you can see in our website, when you mouseover the element “WordPress” in our top menu, you see under it an other list of elements (WordPress Installation, WordPress Theme installation etc) If you want to add this feature to your menu, simply drag and drop the element you want to be displayed under the other element by moving it to the right like in the picture below:
You can also add a link to your menu and set a name of the link that will be displayed in your menu. Under the “Custom links” area you set the url and the label name you want to be displayed and you click “add to menu” Then this label name will appear in your menu and when somebody clicks there, he will be redirected to the link that you set there.
Locate your menu
You can create as much menus you want. One more step is needed to finish this process. You need to set the EXACT LOCATION where these menus will be displayed. For example, the menu named “how to create a website” will be displayed under the logo. But how we did this? Simply as you see under the “Theme Locations“, this theme support 1 menu. . . and in this field you simply put the name of the menu that you want to be displayed on the top and you click save. Other themes support more than one menu and while getting the theme you will be able to see how many menus each theme supports and then set your own menus in the location you want.
Put your menu in your sidebar
In your widget area you can also set menus. By visiting the area “Widgets” under the “Appearance” section in WordPress Dashboard you can drag and drop a “Custom menu” widget and set there the menu that you want to be displayed. In the widget area you usually set the elements you want to appear in your sidebars or in the footer (that depends on your theme). See the picture below to get familiar with the widget area:
So, now you are ready to make attractive and easy to use WordPress menus! If you have more questions about creating WordPress menus, don’t hesitate to post it to our Forum!
