How to Change the Menus on Your WordPress Website

May 15, 2023 By WP Helpline Off

The WordPress menus are quite important as they let your visitors get an overview of your content. You can add more than one level of menus so you can organize your content into different headings which appear as links on your website. You can even change the order of the items in each level of menu so you can make the most relevant items appear at the top. This article will walk you through the process of changing the WordPress menus on your website. It will be assumed that you are using the latest version of WordPress (at the time of writing this article) and have some knowledge of using a content management system (CMS).

The Basics Of WordPress Menus

The first thing you need to do to edit the menus of your WordPress site is log in to your dashboard. Once you are logged in, you will see a screen asking you to make a selection from one of the available options. Clicking the edit icon at the top of the page will take you to the WordPress menu items screen. This is the default screen where you can organize your content and can add, edit, or delete pages via the WordPress backend. On the left-hand side of the page, you will see a variety of menu items – the first one being the Home menu which you can use to navigate to the homepage of your website. Next is the News menu which will take you to the latest articles published on your blog. Beneath these two main menus are additional options such as Photography, Marketing, and About the blog. These three sub-menus are basically collections of links to other pages on your site which are relevant to the content currently displayed on the homepage.

Each menu item can be given a name and a description. This is very useful as keywords are important for search engines to index your content. The option to create a menu link takes you to a page where you can configure the link text and link to the relevant article or page on your site. You can choose from a variety of link styles (like Hybrid, Neat, Curved, and Round) and the option to create a dropdown creates a more navigable button for your visitors.

Adding More Levels Of Menu Parentage

If you are a magazine or a newspaper publisher, you might want to add a new level of organization to your WordPress menu structure. For example, let’s say you want to have a Health menu item that links to all the healthy food articles on your site. After logging in to your website’s dashboard, click on the Edit icon (upper-left corner) and you will see a menu options screen similar to the one below.

In this example, we have added a new parent menu called Health under the previous News parent menu. As you can see in the image above, beneath Health, we have a few other menu items including Diabetes, Heart Disease, Stroke, and Healthy Eating. These are the sub-menus that will appear as links on your website when the Health menu is clicked.

If you want to add a new level of menu parentage, click on the Add button at the top of the Parent menus tab and you will see the screen below. Here, you can search for a parent menu name and then click Choose to select one of the existing parent menus.

Now, let’s say that you want to create a submenu under the Health parent menu called Fitness. To do this, click on the Health parent menu and then, from the dropdown, select Fitness. You will then see a confirmation message indicating that the Fitness submenu has been created. Repeat this process for additional submenus.

Changing The Order Of The Items In A Menu

If you are a food blogger who wants to increase the chance of his blog posts being found by potential customers, you might want to reorder the items in your WordPress menu. Usually, the first item (or homepage link) on a WordPress menu is the Home menu item which, in our example, leads to the homepage of our website. Next, we have the News menu item which, as you will recall, leads to the latest articles published on our site.

If you look at the screenshot above, you can see that we have reordered the items in our menu so that the Home menu item appears first and is linked to the homepage of our site and the News item is second and is linked to the latest articles published on our site. Having a default page (the Home menu item) on your website makes it easier for users to navigate to other pages on your website as it is already the most accessible item on the menu.

Editing Existing Pages Via The WordPress Dashboard

WordPress menus are quite easy to use but if you want to make changes to a page that is already published on your site, you will need to log in to the dashboard of your WordPress site and click on the Edit icon for the specific page you want to edit. When you are editing a page, you will see a variety of options located at the top of the page. Let’s say you want to edit the Home page and you are logged into your dashboard as discussed above. After you have clicked on the Home page’s Edit icon, you will see the screen below.

In this example, we can see that the Home page is already configured with a link to the About page as the first item and has a few other items including the Services and Portfolio sub-menus below. To add a new item to the Home page, simply click on the Add button and a menu options screen will appear with the Services sub-menu as the default option. This Services sub-menu item can then be given a name and a description using the same process discussed above.

Adding More Menu Items

You can add additional pages (or submenus) to your WordPress menu by following the same process discussed above. The only difference is when you are adding a new menu item, instead of clicking on the Add button, you will click the More button and WordPress will display a form where you can enter the relevant information for the new page (or submenu).

When you have added all the pages you want to add to your website (excluding the homepage), click on the Edit icon for the specific page you want to edit. You can then configure the page (adding a new header image, editing the content, etc.) as you would normally do.

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