Custom Menus in WordPress

Welcome back to WordPress

In this video, we're gonna talk about how to create and customize the navigation menu for your site. The menus subpanel is where you create and manage the custom menus for your site. To create a custom menu, first give it a descriptive name. Then, click Create Menu. Now this theme supports two menu locations, a primary menu across the top of the site and a secondary menu for social links, which I'll cover in just a moment. I'll assign our newly created menu to the top menu location. You can also choose to let WordPress automatically add new top-level pages that you create in the future to this menu as well. Now, let's add some items to our menu. WordPress displays a list of the most recently created pages in our site, so I'll just choose all of these pages and add them to the menu.

Once you've added your items, you can drag and drop the menu items into the order you prefer. And you can expand each item to edit or customize its options. I'll rename the welcome page, because it also serves as our static home page. So home makes better sense for this link. Now you can also add menu links to individual blog posts or even custom links to any other website. And we can include out blog categories in this menu so that our visitors can easily navigate to those topics from the same menu. I'll select the categories and click Add to Menu. Then, because these are all categories for our blog posts, it makes the most sense for them to appearas submenu items underneath the link to our blog.

When you've finished building your custom menu, click the Save Menu button. And now if we visit our site, we'll see our new custom menu in action, with drop-down menu items for our blog categories. Now this theme also includes a social links menu. Not all themes support this feature, but it allows visitors to quickly access your social profiles by clicking small icons that represent each of the services. I'll show you what I mean by first creating a new custom menu. This time, however, I'll use the customizer to build this menu so I can see my changes in real time. Now you could call this menu anything you like, but I'll just name it Social Links. Next, just add the web addresses for each of your social profiles as a custom link. For example, I'll paste the link to Stellar Widgets' Twitter profile here. And then I'll create new custom links for each of our other social profiles. Once you've added all your social links,save and publish your new menu. WordPress replaces the custom links with icons for each service, enabling our visitors to easily access our social profiles. Remember, not all themes include support for a social links menu. So check the documentation for your theme. Navigation menus make it easy for your visitors to find the most important content on your site.