Learning how to make a WordPress custom menu for your business means that you are always able to organize your website to look better and be more intuitive.
Most themes have a menu at the top which is the main navigation menu, but there will also be a menu at the top right with a “home” and search button and another menu at the footer.
To customize your main menu and create your header and footer menus, go to your WordPress dashboard, click the “Appearance” tab, and then click “Menus.”
Clicking this will bring you to the menus that already exist on the page of your website as a default.
Looking at the “Manage Locations” tab will show you what the primary, secondary and footer menus are. From the “Menu Name” tab it is also possible to check off where a menu will appear. We will now make menus for each of the locations.
Creating a WordPress Custom Menu
To add pages to a menu, you can select it from the left of the menu screen and click the “Add Page” button. There is the option to search pages, view all of them, or just see the most recent ones. The big thing is that the page must have already been created at that point.
You can add any of these pages to the WordPress custom menu and they will show up with the option to rearrange them by dragging and dropping.
If you want, you can drag these pages so they become sub-menus for other pages on the menu. It is even possible to have subgroups of subgroups.
With each page you can click the down arrow at the right of the button and choose some settings. This allows you to change the name of the page among other things.
Depending on what plug-ins you have installed, you can often have other settings for certain pages. As you would expect, the more plug-ins you have the more functionality will be possible.
Aside from being able to put pages on your menu, you can also put posts and custom links of your choosing there too.
Finally, there is the option to use categories which are a way to divide up your posts into separate groups and have that group be accessible from the main page.
There is an “auto add for new pages” option that will automatically put any new page you create on the menu, but this is rarely used since your menu could potentially grow out of control without you realizing it.
Saving the Menu
You can go to save the menu and then check on the page to see what it looks like. Now that you know it works, you can create another menu.
This secondary menu and footer menu work much the same as your main menu, but the footer menu is only visible to you so you can put different types of links on it.
You can learn more about WordPress navigation in the codex.
The secondary menu shows up at the top but further down and the footer naturally shows up at the bottom.
Some themes will have a different amount of possible locations, and we would suggest that you try creating them just to see what they look like and if you like them. The good news is they are easy to delete so nothing will permanently affect your website.