How the Main Menu Works

How Menus Work and How to Add Links to Them

If your role has the right permissions, go to Appearance → Menus. If you don’t see this option, your account likely doesn’t have menu-editing access — check with an admin.

If the site has more than one menu (e.g. a main header menu and a separate footer menu), make sure you’re editing the right one — there’s usually a dropdown near the top of the screen to switch between them, or separate tabs.

Adding an Item

1. On the left-hand side, find the page, post, or custom link you want to add. These are usually organised into collapsible panels (Pages, Posts, Custom Links, Categories, etc.) — click a panel header to expand it and search/browse within it.
2. Tick the checkbox next to the item(s) you want, then click Add to Menu. It’ll appear at the bottom of the menu structure on the right.
3. Drag it into position in the menu structure on the right:
   • Dragging up or down changes its order in the menu.
   • Dragging slightly to the right nests it as a sub-item (dropdown) underneath the item directly above it.
   • You can nest multiple levels deep, but keep in mind most themes only support one or two levels of dropdown before it becomes hard for visitors to navigate.
4. Click Save Menu. Nothing is saved until you do this — refreshing or navigating away beforehand will lose your changes.

Tip: The menu structure here is independent of the page hierarchy (Parent page setting) covered in the page-creation guide. A page can be nested under a completely different parent in the menu than its actual Parent page setting — they don’t have to match, though keeping them consistent makes the site easier to reason about.

Making Sure the Hierarchy Is Correct

Getting the nesting right in the menu is just as important as getting it right on the page itself — a wrong indent level is one of the easiest mistakes to make and one of the easiest to miss.

• Check indentation carefully after dragging. The drag-and-drop can be fiddly — a small drag to the right nests an item, but it’s easy to accidentally nest something one level too deep (or fail to nest it at all) without noticing. Look at the visual indent of each row before saving; sub-items should appear clearly indented under their parent.
• Confirm the parent is the right one. If an item ends up nested under the wrong top-level page, it’ll show up in the wrong dropdown — visitors expecting to find it under “Services” might instead find it tucked under “About”, for example.
• Watch for accidental orphaning. If you drag an item and it lands at the very left edge, it becomes a top-level menu item instead of a sub-item — easy to do by mistake, and it’ll suddenly appear as its own menu entry rather than inside a dropdown.
• Preview the live menu after saving. Don’t rely on the admin screen alone — the drag-and-drop editor doesn’t always make nesting depth obvious at a glance. Open the site in a new tab and hover through the actual dropdown menus to confirm everything appears where you expect.
• Keep depth shallow where possible. Most themes are only designed to display one or two levels of dropdown cleanly. A third level often either doesn’t display at all or renders awkwardly, so if you find yourself nesting that deep, it may be a sign the item belongs at a higher level instead.
• Cross-check against the Parent page setting. If a page’s Parent page (in Page Attributes) and its position in the menu tell two different stories about where it “lives” on the site, that’s usually a sign one of them needs updating — pick whichever accurately reflects where the page belongs, and update the other to match.

Adding a Custom Link

If you need to link to something that isn’t a page or post on the site — an external website, a PDF, or an anchor link to a specific section of a page — use the Custom Links panel on the left. Enter the URL and the Link Text (what visitors will see), then click Add to Menu.

Removing an Item

Click the small arrow (▾) on the right of the menu item to expand its options, then click Remove.

Careful:

• Removing a page from the menu does not delete the page itself — it just stops it appearing in navigation. The page still exists and is still reachable by direct link or search.
• Deleting a page (from Pages → All Pages) does not automatically remove it from the menu — this leaves a broken link behind that visitors will click and hit a 404. Always check the menu after deleting a page, and remove any reference to it there too.

A Quick Sanity Check Before Saving

• Does the order make sense to a visitor scanning left to right (or top to bottom)?
• Are dropdowns nested under the right parent item, at the right depth?
• Did you save the menu (not just add items to the staging area on the right)?