What is: Navigation Menus

Even in its first iteration, WordPress came built-in with a navigation menu, also known simply as a “menu.” A navigation menu is a series of clickable words that allow users to go directly to a specific location on your WordPress site, aka “navigate” your site.

In WordPress, the way that navigation menus are displayed and located is determined by the theme. The default menu that is loaded on a brand-new WordPress site is a list of all of the published pages. You can, however, create your own menus and format them any way that you want.

Menus can also be nested in hierarchies, so one menu can also have sub-menus. And depending on which theme you are using, you can also have multiple menus that appear on your website.

To create, delete, and edit menus, log into the administration panel of your WordPress site. In the left-hand column, click on “Appearances” and then “Menus.

From there, you can choose what options appear on each menu. Options include links to a post, a page, a testimonial, a custom link, a category, or a media file as well as changing which CSS classes correspond to each menu item. Simply drag and drop to add/delete items to each menu as well as to organize the order in which they appear.

Note: “Primary Menu” can be the name of a menu, but “Primary Menu” refers to a specific piece of real estate on your website where the Primary Menu will be displayed. You can choose any menu to be designated as the Primary Menu and appear in the “Primary Menu” area.

You can also choose to have new pages added automatically to a menu or use hooks and filters to dynamically add more options to an existing menu without having to manually edit your menu(s).