First time here?
Find out how we want to help you as a developer, and plant trees here
WordPress Menu Plugins
What’s wrong with WordPress menus the way they are? Why would anyone bother to install a menu plugin, even pay for one? If you’ve ever asked yourself those questions, you may never have considered the possibility that a menu can do much more than serving as a container for navigation.
Let’s face it – as much as we love WordPress, its native menu functionality is kind of meh. In many cases, it’s even a waste of space. Do the menu options have to just lie there like dead fish?
Turns out, you can do all kinds of mind-blowing things to make your menus do more work for you. Like adding your logo. Or images and links. WordPress Widgets. Dashicons and Glyphicons and call to action buttons.
But not every type of menu is right for every website. So here are some questions to ask yourself before deciding on a menu plugin:
- How much content does your site have? Does it have a few hundred pages or a few ten thousand?
- What kind of menu would best suit your site’s overall design, for all devices?
- Will you need (or prefer) a lot of options for customization?
- Do you need a menu that will help you conserve home page real estate by displaying featured stories or latest posts?
- Are you willing and able to pay for the right plugin?
Why menus should be chosen with care
Ease of navigation can make or break a visitor’s experience on your website. They want to find the information they’re looking for quickly and easily. If they have a hard time finding their way around your site, they’ll go back to the SERP and pick another site.
If you make it quick and easy for them by showing them exactly where to go at every turn, they’ll find what they want and have a positive experience.
Clearly phrased menu options can help visitors and search engine spiders understand what your content is about. Clever design and effective use of color can supply visual cues, too. But what if the navigation’s design and functionality could use all those elements to create a compelling experience for your visitor?
First, let’s discuss the different types of menus.
Different types of website menus
There are new types of menus and an overwhelming number of plugins that offer incredible features. To make it easier to wrap your head around, we’ll break these down into categories and discuss what they’re used for.
Responsive/mobile-friendly menus
It should go without saying that your website’s menu needs to be fully responsive on any device. According to Statista, mobile browsing accounts for roughly half of the web traffic across the world. You’d think all menus would be fully responsive by default by now, but some work better than others.
Whatever else you want your menu to do, do yourself and your visitors a favor by choosing a plugin that lets you build a mobile menu.
Menus that feature content
What if you could make your website menu look like a professional magazine table of contents complete with photos and links to your featured articles? Would you still need to build a dedicated Featured Content page?
Mega menus
Mega menus are popular for large sites with lots of content and features. They’re great for organizing navigation so that a visitor can understand it visually at a glance, reducing the need for them to rely on short-term memory and forget what they were looking for.
Then again, your site may not have a ton of content or different features. So do you need a mega menu? Here’s an article by Rachel McCollin to break down the pros and cons for you.
Vertical menus
Vertical menu designs are crucial for mobile-friendly navigation. Some menu plugins allow you to build a vertical menu as one possible option, and others are vertical by default.
It is possible to make these every bit as functional and beautiful as other types of rich content menus and still take full advantage of the vertical orientation.
Sticky Menus
These also have pros and cons. On one hand, having certain navigational elements always stay in one place can help users find where to go next and reduces the amount of clicking and scrolling they’ll have to do to see everything.
According to WisdmLabs, people like this.
On the other hand, if these elements never move, they can take up a lot of space. And if they overlap a bit of text that your visitor is trying to read, that’s annoying.
Fullscreen menus
Maybe what you need is a menu that just covers the whole page. If all these types of menus are pageant contestants, the fullscreen menu is the one who ends her talent routine with a standing hair flip.
Menus can be displayed over a background image, a solid color opaque, or a semi-transparent overlay. The main thing they do is block distractions to bring attention to your site’s most important pages. And they do that very well.
You could turn your site navigation into a branded list of menu options, like the simple but crazy effective one-page menu shown in the featured image.
Scroll down to check out the menu plugins that make all this functionality possible.
Products
WP Sticky
WP Sticky is the only plugin that lets you make any element of your website sticky no matter which themes, page builders, or other plugins you’re using. Have pages with long form content? Sticky navigation will help your visitors find their way around more quickly and easily, keeping them on your site longer. Need a sticky header? Footer? Form? Menu? Image? Text? Button? Testimonial? Widget? Sidebar? You get the point. You could make every element sticky if you wanted to. (Though we strongly advise against it.) Read this detailed description to learn more about its features, applications, pros and cons.
Responsive Menu
Responsive Menu, by ExpressTech, is one of the hottest responsive menu plugins around. It focuses on smoothly functioning responsive menus for every device size, accessibility, and clean code. Those core principles combined with enough customization options to make tens of thousands of possible menu designs make Responsive Menu a serious contender among the top menu plugins for WordPress. The free version is packed with enough useful features that you can take your menu designs far enough to suit your desires. But if you want to get even more out of it, like button animation effects and the ability to change the opacity of each of the dozens of colors, you can access the premium features by purchasing the Advanced or Pro plans.
Can your menu do that? Website menus have experienced a Renaissance in recent years as developers and UX designers demand they do more than just sit there like lumps on a log.
They wanted menus that would work as hard as they do, and now a slew of WordPress menu plugins has proliferated on the web, making these features available to folks like you and me.
Now you can build out striking menus that feature your content, contain images, links, icons and even widgets. And you can customize them with your brand colors and fonts to match your website design seamlessly.
ElementsKit is a suite packed with addons to expand Elementor's page-building power. With over 70 widgets and extensions, 450+ predesigned page sections, and more than 20 slick homepage templates, you really can build an entire site with all the essential pages, a blog, and an online store in a single weekend. Or you can take your time and brood over each element -- it's up to you.
It will be easy, it will be fun, and you'll get a fully responsive website built with clean code that's not bloated with gobbledygook.
Don't use WooCommerce features or video galleries? Simply disable them so the assets don't load. Every single widget is toggleable, all to strip your site's code down to fighting shape, make your pages load fast, and give your visitors that much more incentive to stay.