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Working with Menus in WordPress

Services: Law Firm Website Design . SEO . Internet Marketing . Law Firm Marketing Guide . Content Marketing . PPC

Menus are critical part of your website. Tasked with listing and displaying the main links to your website’s content, they are vital for getting visitors to your key pages. An often overlooked WordPress feature is its Menu editor that keeps menus tidy, organized, and most importantly, easily editable. If you add a new page to your firm’s website but can’t add it to the main navigation menu, no visitors will find it!

But worry not: At PaperStreet, we aim to make content editable from inside the WordPress admin area so that our clients have the ability to edit their firm’s websites. If your WordPress website was built by us and has a navigation menu, it is likely that we built your menu using the WordPress Menu editor. In this brief tutorial we will cover how you can get in and make edits to your website’s navigation menu.

Step One – Getting In

To make any edits to your WordPress website, you need access to its admin area, or “Dashboard.” The Dashboard most often exists at an address like this:

www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin

Simply add /wp-admin/ to the end of your firm’s full domain name, press Enter, and you should find yourself at a login screen.

Security is important here so that only a select group of individuals can make edits to your website. You will need proper username and password configured specifically for your site. We often make these passwords long ‘n strong, so be sure to copy and paste the credentials that we send you when entering them in the form.

Once logged in, you will find yourself in the WordPress admin area, or Dashboard. Look to the left column, which provides what is essentially the WordPress Dashboard’s main navigation menu.

“Menus” are somewhat hidden under a larger sub-section called “Appearance.” Hover over “Appearance,” then select “Menus” to make your way to the menus editor.

PS Website Photo

Step Two – Making Menu Edits

Once on the menu editor, the first thing you will want to do is make sure you are editing the correct menu.

Click on this the top dropdown menu to see how menus are used on the website. The less menus you see here, the easier it will be. You want the menu titled “Main Navigation,” “Main Menu,” or something similar. Select it in the dropdown, then press the nearby “Select” button. This will reload the page to show this menu.

PS Website Photo

If the menu items are listed in the same order as your website’s main navigation, congratulations – you probably found the right menu!

Note: We do NOT recommend the creation of new menus, only editing of what has been built. Integrating new menus on your website will require assistance from our development team. Please contact helpme@paperstreet.com with details on your edit and we will be happy to help.

Next, to make edits to the chosen menu, you will concern yourself mostly with the left column, which lists all of the different content pages on your website. Content is divided by post type, starting with Pages and oftentimes breaking into lists for Practice Areas, Attorneys and Offices, common sub-sections on PaperStreet websites.

So, if you wanted to add an Attorney page to the main navigation, you would expand “Attorneys,” find the attorney page you wish to add to the menu, check the box near his/her page, and then press “Add to Menu.”

PS Website Photo

Pressing “Add to Menu” will do just that: Add it to the bottom of the menu items on the right side column.

Once the menu item appears in the right column, you are free to click and drag it into position. Simply click, hold, and drag the menu item you’ve added to the menu. Other menu items will automatically make room for it.

Be wary of dragging a menu item so that it becomes a sub-page of another page. If it appears indented in the list, drag it more to the left to put it in line with other pages.

Feel free to continue adding pages from the left column into the right. Re-arrange them with more drags until they are in proper position. When you feel ready to update the menu, committing your changes to the live website, press “Save Menu” in the bottom-right of the window.

Step Three – Testing

It is crucial to reload your website and test that the menu was updated as expected. If you discover any issues, do not worry. Return to the menu editor and your menu will be there in the same state you last left it. Items can be rearranged as needed.

If you ever want to remove an item from the menu, click on the right-side of the menu item to expand it, then look for “Delete.”

PS Website Photo

Remember to “Save Menu” when your updates are complete.

Practice some more with menus, and you may find they are easier to work with than expected. In the future, anytime you add content to your website, you can now make it immediately accessible to visitors by updating your menus. Such power!


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