WordPress Custom Menus – Adding a top level menu item

WordPress moved from a blogging platform to a CMS and website building tool when it released its custom menu feature back in June 2010 with WordPress 3.0.

Custom menus give easy control over the structure of page menus.  Over the releases since 3.0 WordPress have improved the usability of the Custom Menu administration screen, found in Appearances>Menus.

Whilst being easy to use in many ways with drag and drop positioning, there are one or two tricks that are not obvious.

This short video demonstrates how to create a menu item, with sub menu items, where the top level menu is not actually a page.

Transcript:

“On this demo WordPress website, I have a fairly typical menu structure, with a Home page, About page, Services and Contact.

Under Services I have a couple of pages, one called First Services and Second Service.

But this is not actually how I want the site to look, because I don’t want the top menu item to link to a page at all, I just want it to be a holding menu item. So to achieve that, we need to go into the menu editor, and you will see here the typical setup with each item, Home , About, Services all pointing to page.

What we need to do is create a dummy menu item called Services, and we use the LINKS for this.

Now it is important that we put in the hash (#) or gate (#) symbol into the URL otherwise there will be problems on touch screen devices if you just leave this blank. And then we put in the text that we want to have for the menu item, and we add that to the menu. You will see that we have a custom menu item at the bottom here for Services.

We no longer need the page Services one, so we click on the little arrow there and then we remove Services.

Drag into the right position, drag these across into the correct place, and we save the menu.

With that done, we return back to the main site, we can see that the menus work as we expect, but if we click on Services nothing happens, but click on First Services we go to a page.

Obviously you can go and tidy up and remove your unneeded page, Services, leaving you with the menu structure as you need it to be.”