One of the most important parts of a website is the menu. You can customize this menu entirely to your liking from the backend of WordPress. But, how do you do this? What do you need to consider? And what are the best tips for customizing a WordPress menu? We are happy to give a comprehensive answer to these questions in this article.
Why customize a WordPress menu?
There are several reasons why it is advisable to customize your WordPress menu:
- If you want to make your website more user-friendly: by putting together a perfect menu, you make navigating for your visitors a lot easier. You not only do this with a menu, but also with the so-called ‘breadcrumbs’.
- If you’ve added new items to your website: Have you recently added new pages or other items to your website? Then you may want to have it in your menu. To get that done, you’d have to adjust your menu.
- If you want to adjust your website structure: over time, you will gain possible new insights. A logical consequence of this may be that you want to adjust your website structure. This is also a common reason why people want to customize their WordPress menu.
Customize a step-by-step plan for your WordPress menu?
Do you recognize one of the above situations? Then it is first of all important to think carefully about the new layout of your menu. What menu items do you want in your new menu? Which items do you want to remove from your current menu? And which menu do you want to adjust at all?
It is true that many websites have multiple menus. This can be, for example, a main menu, a submenu and a menu in the footer. Before you want to adjust your WordPress menu, you should determine what your wishes are exactly.
Do you know what your wishes are? Then we advise you to follow the step-by-step plan below:
- Step 1: Log in to your WordPress website. You can do this by going to your website and then typing /wp-admin or /wp-login after your domain name. Log in with your login details.
- Step 2: On the left, click on ‘View’ and then on ‘Menus’. You will now arrive at a page where you will see different menus of your WordPress website.
- Step 3: Select the desired menu. Chances are that you will see multiple menus on the page in question. Decide which menu you want to adjust and select that menu.
- Step 4: Make the menu to your liking. You can now start customizing your menu. You do this by removing menu items, adding other menu items or by adjusting the order of your menu items.
- Step 5: Save your new menu. After you have made the desired changes, you can save your new menu. Now open your website and check whether everything is to your liking and whether everything works.
Tips for customizing your WordPress menu
If you are going to adjust your WordPress menu, you will see a triangle behind each menu item. By clicking on this triangle, you can customize any menu item to your liking:
- Title attribute: it is not mandatory to fill in this attribute, but it does benefit the On Page SEO.
- Navigation label: this is the text that appears in the menu on your website. For example, you can choose ‘About us’ or ‘Contact’.
- Link target: specifies how you want the new menu item to be opened. Do you want to open it in a new window? Want to open it in a new tab? Or do you want to open it in the same window? The latter is advisable.
- Removal: this possibility speaks for itself immediately. This option allows you to delete the menu item in question. This does not delete the entire page or post, but removes the attribute from your menu.
Another useful tip is to add a submenu to your WordPress menu. Especially if you have a very extensive website, you can improve the structure in this way. This not only benefits the surfing behavior of your visitors, but also your ranking within Google. Google’s algorithm also values an understandable menu structure.
Conclusion
The advice is to adjust your WordPress menu as soon as possible. This is critical for both your visitors and Google. Do you know how to best customize your menus? Or are you unable to customize the WordPress menus to your liking? We are happy to assist you!
At WordPressmaintenance.com we have already created and adapted countless menus. These actions no longer hold any secrets for us. Feel free to contact us to discuss all the possibilities.
