How to Manage Menus in WordPress?

Navigational menus are essential and unavoidable part of any website. WordPress has solid menu management to create a menu with any type of content. Also you can drag and rearrange the positions easily and assign the menu to the supported locations like header or footer.

How to Create Menu in WordPress?

Login to you WordPress admin panel and navigate to “Appearance > Menu” section to create a menu. Give a name for your menu and click on the “Create Menu” button.

Once the menu name is created, there will be additional options for menu settings. You can choose automatically adding top level pages to your menu and choose the location it is to be shown. Also you will notice a new tab named “Manage Locations” will appear now.

All available content types are shown in the left column. Drag and drop the required page or post from the left column under menu structure.

WordPress allows adding posts, pages, custom post types, categories and custom links as menu items. You can modify the menu name under “Navigation Label” to the desired name you want. This will be very useful to use precise word for categories and length posts and page. For example, if you have a category named “Website Building Tutorial” then you can just use “Web Design” to fit the description in the menu item. Below picture shows the possible arrangements of menu items in WordPress:

1. Change the name of the menu item
2. Move up or down to the required position
3. Drag up or down to the required position
4. Drag the items right side to create a sub-menu item.

Save your changes to create a menu.

Assigning Menu to Location

Once your menu is created, assign it to the desired location supported by your theme under “Manage Locations” tab. Most of the commercial themes will support at least header and footer menu locations. Below is the example from twenty seventeen theme having header and social links menu.

Choose the required menu for that location and save your changes. The menu items will be start showing on the live site instantly.

Managing Menus Through Live Customizer

The above way of creating menu is the static way. You can only see the live menu after saving the changes. Alternatively you can use live customizer under “Appearance > Customize” to create a menu with the live preview. The process of creating and assigning the menu remains same but you can view the live preview on the right panel.

Also you can check the display of menu items on mobile and desktop by selecting the devices available nearer to right corner.

Using Custom Menu Widget in WordPress

WordPress by default has a widget named “Custom Menu”. This widget will help to assign the created menu to widget area like sidebar and footer. It is very simple to use – drag and  drop the widget, choose the required menu from the drop down box and save your changes.