The menu is one of the most important navigation elements on any website. It neatly removes all links while directing your visitors to the content they need so they don’t take up much space on your homepage. While optimizing your website navigation is an important UX consideration, a well-designed menu is also an important visual component of your website. made to look beautiful, as well as utilitarian. That’s why there is a wide variety of menu plugins for WordPress: Whatever your preferences, there is always a plugin for you.
WordPress’ default themes already come with a menu solution. Why do you need a plugin? Well, we have an answer to that too.
Why Do I Need the Menu Plugin?
WordPresss default themes have a menu feature out of the box. Still, this feature has its limitations. It’s actually pretty simple: you only get one layout and it can take a long time to build anything but the most basic. But even a basic menu has many options. If you want to learn more about how to create a menu in WordPress, you can check out our handy tutorial.
Still, the very popular mega menu doesn’t come with default WordPress themes and neither do menus with rich media like product images.
All these shortcomings, although they may seem minor, can be overcome with a theme’s options. But sometimes you will find yourself working on an extremely tight budget and can’t afford a professionally developed theme with multiple menu layouts. Or it could be that a theme that works great for your website doesn’t have a built-in menu layout or features you would want to have. maybe you want too much media-rich menusmaybe sticky menusmaybe vertical or tabbed menu. Or you may want to make it easier using menu design. a visual menu editor.
You can have all of this and more with a WordPress menu plugin. These are the plugins we have chosen for you:
QuadMenu It is a plugin that offers the option to create adaptive and responsive mega menus. The feature we think might be the most interesting for new users, visual drag and drop menu editing tool. You can use it to add, remove, and edit all elements, including widgets, in your WordPress menu. The customization options are also extensive, allowing you to fit the QuadMenu into any website layout or style.
Among the many features of QuadMenu various menu directions (vertical, horizontal, sticky, among others), screen size-dependent menu contents, pop-up animations, and menu display conditions (on hover or click). The plugin comes with support for Google Fonts and Font Awesome.
The pro version of the plugin comes with a few eye-catching menu layouts like tab menus and carousel menus as well as many other interesting options.
If you are looking for an automatically updated menu feature, Advanced Sidebar Menu it could be just for you. you can use for automatically manage menu hierarchies using the parent/child attribute of your pages and categories. You can keep your menu clean by assigning your pages and category parent/child relationships and the menu creates itself. This doesn’t mean that the plugin is somehow anchored: you can very easily exclude categories and pages individually or at a hierarchical level, and sort pages differently (by title or time of publication). This plugin creates a sidebar menu, but the fact that it’s automatically generated makes it a great solution for websites with lots of articles. The plugin requires some editing as it displays the child elements of the page you are on.
The professional version of the plugin comes with some advanced styling options, custom post types in menus, support for a custom navigation menu (i.e. not a sidebar menu), and more.
WP Responsive Menu default WordPress menu more responsive, customizable and animated menu feature. You can adjust the menu orientation, turn the menu on and off using a swipe command, animate the menu icons, and easily configure the font size and styles. It even comes with a optional menu search box.
A feature of its responsive design is you can configure this menu plugin like this: show or hide categories depending on device screen size your visitor is using to access it.
The professional version of the plugin comes with additional features like WooCommerce integration, social media icons, Google Fonts support, RTL support, and more.
You can also have a look here while the plugin is running.
Another menu plugin Designed to be mobile friendly, Responsive Menu It offers a hassle-free solution for your responsive menu needs. comes with a wide range of customization optionsincluding those for font colors, sizes and alignment, a menu background image feature, various menu animation types and speeds, custom menu triggersand variable menus depending on screen size. The developers also demo If you want a handle on how it looks for your users.
WP Mobile Menu provides you an easy way to create responsive menus works great primarily on mobile devices, but also offers some interesting features overall. Three levels of menu depth, an overlay when the menu is open, variable display types, and also show or hide various menu items on mobile. One of the standout features that we especially love is the background image for the menus.
this premium version The plugin comes with various features depending on the pricing plan, such as floating menus depending on the page, hiding menus for certain pages, WooCommerce integration, priority support, and more.
As the name suggests, Max Mega Menu It is a menu management plugin. turns your existing menus into mega menus. This gives you the option to add widgets to your menus, change the behavior of the menus, and reformat the menu using your theme editor. This plugin also makes it easy mobile friendly design, with options to hide submenus on mobile devices and customize menu behavior depending on the device used to access the website. And this is just the free version of the plugin.
Max Mega Menus professional version It comes with sticky menus, tabbed menus, a search box, and more. The developers also demoso you can see the plugin in action.
slick menu It is a premium plugin that provides a set of layouts and animations exclusively for you. designed to look great on any device. You can create unlimited levels of subcategories and customize each of them to show or hide depending on the device, and even how they appear in terms of sizes and media content. The plugin is also menu search boxan extensive library of icons, background images and videos, and more. This comprehensive list of features is not tied to the pricing plan. Instead, the pricing plans are solely based on the number of websites you want to use it on.
The developers also provided countless free extensions to further improve the user experience: easy duplication, dynamic posts and social media icons as menu items, and one-click export/import.
A premium menu plugin, UberMenu boasts grid menu creation system With layout controls that allow you to fully customize each menu item. Arrange your menu items in columns, tabs, rows and decorate with images, icons and other media. You can manipulate your menus as you wish and configure their behavior. As expected, your menu also includes: as many widget areas as you want. But you don’t have to do all the design work from scratch: UberMenu comes with several pre-designed layouts that you can use as a starting point for your menus.
It can also be a plugin automatically create items based on existing parent/child relationships. These items can then be automatically split into columns and inherit featured images. You can then filter them by genre, term, author, and other criteria.
super fly It is a premium WordPress menu plugin that you can use for create a wide variety of menu layouts: vertical flicking, scrolling or static navigation, compact icon toolbars and full-screen menus. You can then use these menus in addition to your main menu or completely change WordPress’s default. Even if you set the layouts aside, Superfly, Shape your menus using columns, separators, font settings, icons and more. It includes a wide variety of styling options as well as image and video backgrounds, submenu options, and all can be easily used with an image editing tool.
As a result
This rounds out our list of WordPress menu plugins. But which one is right for you? The first consideration is your budget, the second is style. The premium plugins we’ve covered – Slickmenu, UberMenu, and Superfly – will have all the functionality your users might need, among them. The downside of premium plugins is that you can’t test them. What you can and should do is take a long look at the list of features of each plugin and think well about them. If you’re looking for a free plugin that will allow you to create richer, more engaging menus, QuadMenu and Max Mega Menu may be right for you. And if your first concern is mobile friendly design, one possible solution is WPResponsive Menu, Responsive Menu and WP Mobile Menu. Whichever addon you choose, we’re confident we’ve got you covered.
Support our work ❤️
If you enjoyed this article, consider leaving a tip to help us keep publishing great content.
