The WordPress Navigation Menu is a source by which the visitors steer their way through the website. In order to avail premium responsiveness and ease of usage, the navigation should be simple and sharp. Along with the navigation being smooth and self-explanatory, it should also look amazing.

This article will feature some of the easiest and tried and tested ways of customizing a WordPress navigation theme. These methods offer a variety of options to achieve an awe inspiring design for WordPress theme development that keeps the users engaged.

Basically, there are three ways of customizing the Navigation Menu, which are

Using A Plugin : Plugins have always proven to be the easiest way to perform simple to complex tasks concerned with WordPress. WordPress features some daunting plugins for optimizing the navigation menu.

Using customization options within the WordPress theme : Every WordPress theme comes with some options for customizing the navigation menu. With some tweaks, one can create wonderful menus.

Manually coding with CSS : The last way to get custom navigation menu is by coding the CSS classes and adding it up in the theme.

Using WordPress Navigation Menu Plugins

1) Admin Menu Editor

This navigation menu customization plugin is quite popular among the WordPress theme development personnel as well as general WordPress users. The plugin features all necessary options for WordPress website owners and bloggers to manage the navigation function of their website. The Admin Menu Editor makes it easier to change

• Menu titles
• URL
• CSS classes
• Menu items
• Sub-menus

All these functions are generally performed with the help of drag and drop facility. This makes it easier even for some one who is not good with coding to make relevant changes in the website.

2) Custom Menu Wizard

The Custom Menu Wizard WordPress plugin targets the creation of a navigation menu that is visually as well as functionally amazing. The plugin divides the navigation menu into a tree based system to display the pages.

3) Suppamenu

This is a simple yet effective plugin for customizing the WordPress menu. The plugin features 10 pre-installed themes & search options, custom logos and much more. You can easily change backgrounds, colors, icons & other styles.

Customizing From The Theme Menu Options

Every premium WordPress theme comes with some basic option for customization. Generally, a theme may include upto three menus for navigation and some customization options. In order to customize the design, a menu has to be created in the WordPress admin panel.

In the admin dashboard, select the theme menu and click on options. Now select the navigation tabs from the dropdown list. Here, one can see alternates for navigation menu as well as option to customize every function.

Here, you can specify how you want to present the data to the visitors.

Manually Coding With CSS

One of the trending ways of optimizing the navigation menu for WordPress website is with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This method is used to modify the navigation menu manually. The CSS classes are used within WordPress and added to the WordPress menu items.

From the WordPress dashboard, click on Appearance >> Menus. In the top right of the screen, select the screen options menu. Now select the menu item you want to style and click on the related arrow. This will show you a new CSS field to add a class name. Here, you need to add the descriptive class name and save it.

Now, you can simply use custom CSS to change the font, background, size and anything else. Although this method takes time as compared to the ones mentioned above, styling the CSS manually enables to get you creative designs that fit your needs.

Conclusion

Along with being intuitive and simple, the navigation menu must be appealing. The menu styling determines the user experience of the WordPress website, so it should be well sorted out. Depending upon the theme and requirements, any of the methods mentioned above can be used to create a custom navigation menu.