How to create a WordPress Menu

To create a WordPress menu, navigate to the dashboard > “Ap­pear­ance” > “Menus”.

Now that you’ve created your WordPress menu, you can add elements to it. As a standard, you can link pages, content, web links, and cat­e­gories. Depending on your chosen theme, you may be able to select ad­di­tion­al menu items which WordPress will display on the left side under “Add menu items”. To add an element to a WordPress menu, select it and click “Add to Menu”.

Now that all your chosen elements are in­te­grat­ed into the WordPress menu, use drag-and-drop to determine their order. To do this, simply hover the mouse over the element and drag it to the ap­pro­pri­ate location while holding down the mouse button. If a page is a subpage, drag the element below the parent page slightly to the right and release the mouse button. That’s how you create multiple menu levels. Note, however, that not every theme displays an unlimited number of menu levels. In general, try to avoid too much nesting, otherwise the menu may be confusing.

To adapt elements in the WordPress menu, click on the in­di­vid­ual menu items to launch an editing panel. Below the name of the element, you can assign your own class to the menu item or remove the element among other things. A separate class is useful, for example, if you want the menu item to stand out visually from the other elements. If certain functions do not appear in the editing mask, click on “Screen Options” at the top right of the screen and activate the functions by clicking on the checkbox.

Once you’ve created a WordPress menu it will not au­to­mat­i­cal­ly be displayed on your site. First, you need to decide where you wish to display the nav­i­ga­tion panel. To do this, switch to the “Manage Locations” tab. Depending on the theme, WordPress lists various position options. Select the desired menu at the cor­re­spond­ing position and click on “Save Changes”.

Sometimes, instead of creating a WordPress menu, you may want to delete one. That may be the case when you have several menu options and want to remove unused menus to keep a tidier overview. To do this, simply select the cor­re­spond­ing WordPress menu and click “Delete Menu”.