Make your blog easier to navigate for your readers. Help them get to the most valuable content with a few clicks by organizing your menus in WordPress. Watch this video to learn how to help your readers browse through your website with much more ease by using the WordPress Menus feature.

Have fun!

Transcript of Today's Episode

Hello and welcome to another how-to video from learningwithleslie.com. My name is Leslie Samuel, and in this video, I'm going to be talking about how to create and manage menus in WordPress. So, let's get right into it.

I'm at my blog at learningwithleslie.com. What you're going to see here is that I have two navigation menus. I have a main navigation menu here, and then, I have a top navigation menu here. When you first installed WordPress, WordPress has a very specific way of dealing with these menus. What it typically does is it just adds any pages that you create to the main navigation. This is not necessarily what you want. You want to be able to control what's going to be in that navigation menu because this is going to help people to navigate your site. When someone comes to your website, you want to highlight the things that you think are important so that they can get to the most valuable information, and get the most value out of your blog.

So, this is how we're going to do that. We're going to go to our WordPress admin area, and then, in the ‘Appearance' section, I'm going to click on this disclosure triangle, and then, I'm going to go to ‘Menus.' This is a feature that many people don't know about, and in my opinion, it's a very important feature. I'm going to show you how to use that right now.

So, here you can see I already have two menus set up. I have my main menu, and I have a top menu, and if I click here, it will go to the top menu. And, you can see the items that are in that menu. These are menus that I have already created. But, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a demo menu by clicking here. And, I'm just going to call it ‘Demo menu,' and click on ‘create menu.'

Then, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some menu items. So, I can add some pages, categories, and links. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add one of each. So, let's say, I want to add, I'm going to start with a link. I want to add a link to my homepage. So, I'm going to put www.learningwithleslie.com, and I'm going to call that my home link, then I'm going to click ‘add to menu.' And you'll see that it will appear there.

Then, I want a link to my podcast episodes page. If the page that I want is not here, then, I'll just click on ‘view all' to see all of the pages that I have available on my blog. Then, I'm going to click on ‘add to menu' again, and you'll see it will place it right beneath that.

Then, I'm going to scroll down, and I'm going to add a category. So, I have my ‘podcast episodes,' and maybe I'm going to add ‘interviews.' So, I'm going to click that and add it to the menu, and then, you'll see it will show up here.

Now, if I want to use the dropdown menu feature, what I do is I just select whichever one I want to be in the dropdown menu, and move it to the right. This will then mean that the interview category will show up when I take my mouse, and I hover over podcast episodes. Whenever I'm finished, I can just simply click on ‘save menu.' It will then save the menu, and then I can use that menu on my blog.

Now, over here, you see I have ‘theme locations.' I have a primary menu and a secondary menu. This will depend on your theme. You may not have a primary and a secondary, you may have more. You may have a footer menu, for example.

Now, what I need to do is I need to select where I want to see that demo menu. So, let's say, I'm going to see that demo menu as my secondary menu. And, I'm just going to do this temporarily. Then, I'll click on ‘save.' Once it's saved, I'll come back to my blog,, and hit ‘refresh,' and then, you'll see I have ‘home,' and ‘podcast episodes.' If I put my mouse over ‘podcast episode,' it shows me ‘interviews.'

That is how I go about setting that up. I'm going to change this back because I don't want that menu there, and click on ‘save,' and once I do that, it will show me the previous menu once again.

So, that's how you do it. Make sure that you add the most useful content to your menus, and make it so that your website readers are going to get the most value out of your navigation menus.

That's pretty much it for this how-to video. If you like to see more, you can come back to the website at learningwithleslie.com where I'll be adding many more over time. This is Leslie Samuel. That's it for this video, and I'll see you on the next one.