Add and Edit Navigation Menu Links

Every webmaster needs to know how to edit the navigational menus that direct visitors to the most important sections of your website. In most cases, your website will have a single menu across the top of the page, although it’s also possible to place the menu in a sidebar to the left or the right, or to have multiple menus.

Here I’m using the example of my home club, with the menu across the top of the page.

If you have administrator rights to the website, you will see two different edit buttons when viewing the front end of your site, Edit Site (edit the design) and Edit Page (or Edit Post, Edit Event) for editing the content of a specific page or post you’re viewing. The menu is visible on all pages of your website, so it’s part of the design rather than part of a specific.

Clicking Edit Site takes you into the WordPress Site Editor, which allows you to edit the different page templates included with your WordPress theme. There can be different templates for your front page, inside pages, blog posts, events, and other categories. Typically, you will use the same navigation menu in all of these contexts.

Design templates include placeholders for the page or post title and page or post content. The emphasis here is on layout and site-wide design elements, rather than the content of any specific page.

In the screenshot shown below, I’ve clicked on the Header section of my page template. This can also be edited as a separate document (a “Template Part” in WordPress jargon), but here it’s shown in context.

Once the Header component is selected, I have to either (a) click again on the Navigation block to edit its properties or (b) click on the Edit navigation button that appears when the header is selected.

With the Navigation block selected, the editor sidebar shows a listing of all the menu items and submenu items (shown indented under the top-level menu items). You can rearrange menu items by drag-and-drop. Drag them to the right, indented under another item, to create a submenu.

Here is some zoomed-in detail on main menu and submenu items on the Club Awesome website.

Adding a menu item

To add a menu item, scroll to the bottom of the list and click the Add block button. Menu items are considered a type of block, contained within the navigation blocks.

It’s possible to add other blocks, such as social media icons, but the default is to add a Navigation item. Clicking on the add block will present you with prompt to search for the the page you want to add or manually enter a URL (web page address). Recent pages you’ve added to your website will be shown so you can just click to select them.

You can also click Create page, and WordPress will create a blank, draft page with the title that you enter. Note that this news menu item will not appear on the front end of the site until that new page goes from draft status to published.

You can include links to external websites, such as toastmasters.org or your district website, by pasting a link into the Search or type URL field. The web address will appear initially as the text of the menu item, so the next step will be to edit the menu item as detailed below.

Editing a menu item

If you click on a specific menu item, rather than the Navigation block that represents the entire menu, you will be presented with options for customizing the link text. For a page on your website, the link text will default to being the same as the title of that page, but you can edit it to be something else. For example, I might change the link to the Contact Us page to just be “Contact” for the sake of brevity.

In the case of a link to toastmasters.org, such as a page describing Pathways, the external link would initially show up with navigation link text like www.toastmasters.org/education/pathways and I would want to change it to something like Toastmasters Pathways.