This article describes how to create and add menus to your WordPress site.
The Default Menu
Out of the box WordPress adds a menu at the top of the page which has whatever pages are published at the moment. As you add pages to your site, they will be added to this menu as well. It will get to a point where the items won’t fit and you really don’t want all your pages listed there, you want to choose specific pages or posts to direct your visitor to the most important areas of your site.
Create a New Menu
Once you go to the Menus page you will be prompted to “Create your first menu below”. Make sure to choose a name that describes your menu properly, for example “Main Menu”, “Footer Menu”, “Sidebar Menu”. Click on the “Create Menu” button to save the menu and start adding items to it.
From this screen you can also choose the Display locations of your menu. Each theme has different display locations and will be shown in that “Menu Settings” area. Our current theme “Twenty twenty” has 5 different display locations: Desktop Horizontal Menu, Desktop Expanded Menu, Mobile Menu, Footer Menu and Social Menu.
Add items to your menu
Your menu is now created, lets add some items to it. You can add Pages, Posts, Custom Links and Categories. The items are put on boxes like you see in the screenshot below. You can drag and drop these boxes to order them in the way you want them to be listed, you can also drag items to be “children” of items (which will create a sub menu for them).
You can rename your items to your liking for example even if your page is named “Services” you can name it to show “My Services”.
Custom Links are links that are outside of WordPress. You can add these links easily to your menu and create for example a “Social Media Menu” with links to Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Its easy to choose between menus so you can edit them, and if you need to create additional menus WordPress gives you a handy link to create it.
Viewing the Display Locations
If you created and assigned your first menu to the “Desktop Horizontal Menu” you can view it in the homepage of the site right where all the pages had been listed before..
The “Footer Menu” position for the Twenty Twenty theme is located right after all the blog posts/content has been listed.
In order to see the Mobile Menu location you will have to shrink your browser window until you see the menu location.
The Manage Locations Tab
On the Menu page you will see a tab called “Manage Locations”. You can go to this tab to choose the different locations for all the menus you have created. This is faster than to have to go to each menu and set the location there. Always remember to save your changes!
Conclusion
Depending on how many menus you have in your site, managing them will be relatively easy. If you have a multilingual site your menus in the second language will go here as well.
Thank you for reading.