Chapter 11: Menus

Your pages are built. Now your visitors need a way to get to them. That’s the job of your menu, the row of links across the top of every page.

Right now WordPress is making its best guess. Until you build a menu yourself, it simply lists every page you’ve created, in whatever order it likes, including the Sample Page nobody needs to see.

Plan Your Menu First

Think about how a customer walks through your site. Most people want to know who you are, what you do, and how to reach you. Put the most important pages first and keep the menu short. Five to seven items is plenty.

For Joe’s Auto Repair, the order is Home, About, Services, Gallery, FAQs and Contact. Contact goes last because that’s where people naturally look for it.

Creating Your Menu

In your dashboard, go to Appearance → Menus. The first time you open it, WordPress pre-fills a menu with every page on your site. That’s a handy start, but you’ll want to tidy it up.

1. Remove any pages you don’t want in the menu by clicking the little arrow on the right of each item and choosing Remove. Keep Home.
2. Give your menu a name. Only you will see it, so something simple like “Main Menu” is fine.
3. In the Pages box on the left, check the pages you want and click Add to Menu, then click Create Menu.
4. Drag the items up or down until they’re in the order you planned.
5. Under Menu Settings, check Primary Menu. This tells your theme where to show it.
6. Click Save Menu.

Leave “Automatically add new top-level pages” unchecked. That way you decide what goes in your menu, not WordPress.

Adding a Dropdown

Some pages have smaller pages that belong underneath them. Joe’s Services page, for example, has two related pages: Brakes and Oil Change. Pages like these are called child pages. In the menu, they can appear as a dropdown list when someone hovers over Services.

There are two parts to setting this up.

1. Tell WordPress where the pages belong.
Open each child page for editing. In the Page Attributes box on the right, set Parent to Services, then click Update. This keeps your pages organized and gives them tidy addresses like yourdomain.com/services/brakes/.

2. Add them to the menu as a dropdown.
Go to Appearance → Menus, check the child pages and click Add to Menu. They’ll land at the bottom of your menu.

Drag each one up so it sits directly below Services, then nudge it slightly to the right. When it’s in the right place, WordPress labels it sub item. Click Save Menu.

Hover over Services on your website, and Brakes and Oil Change will drop down beneath it.

Check Your Work

Visit your site and look at the top of the page. Your menu should be in the order you chose, and hovering over Services should show the dropdown. Click every link to make sure each one goes where it should.

Coming Up: Widgets

Next we’ll look at the sidebar on the right side of your pages and decide what belongs there, and what doesn’t.