Large number of businesses and individuals are using WordPress as a content management system. Generally, while developing such kind of website, several custom menus are required for different page templates. Although the native menu creation system of WordPress is quite flexible, you cannot create advanced effects (
e.g. sliding sub-menus) unless you're comfortable with CSS and HTML. If you're not good at web designing, you can use several good plugins to make powerful and beautiful menus for your WordPress-powered site without writing a single line of code. These plugins not only lets you create multiple menus in quick time, but also helps you customize their placements, appearance, and functioning. Almost each of these plugins works well with every free or premium theme giving you enough flexibility to provide a better navigation system to your visitors.
JQuery Accordion Menu Widget - This is one of the best plugins to create JQuery-powered vertical accordion menus. You can easily create multilevel menus nested several levels deep as per your need. You can also define custom actions for click and hover events through this plugin. You can also configure auto-expansion of sub-menus based on pages and other page elements. You can also customize hover delay and sliding speed of menus. Users having little knowledge of CSS can also customize menu skins to create a truly unique solution.
Menu Master Custom Widget - If you want to create a fairly complex multilevel menu in the sidebar, then this plugin lets you do that in few easy steps. This useful plugin lets you use both images and text as menu options. Its intuitive layout editor helps you create large multilevel menus in very less time. You can also use pages as a menu item. Depending on the requirement, you can also create a large grid-style menu. In-built support for JQuery lets you create awesome effects for your menus. You can also style your menus easily through custom CSS.
WP-Easy Menu - If you want to create a dynamic menu that automatically grows as you publish more content on your blog, then this powerful plugin is made just for you. You can use text links, pages, posts, taxonomies, categories and custom post types as your menu items. If you've designed a menu based on categories, adding more categories automatically grows your dynamic menu without any need to make the changes. Such kinds of menus are used in special ways when you're creating a large site with dozens of categories that shrink or grow with the passage of time.
JQuery Mega Menu Widget - This plugin is perfect for portals and eCommerce websites. It lets you create customized product showcasing menus where you can include an image, multiple links, and text in each menu item. It's very flexible with dozens of configurable options to adjust the appearance and animation speed of your menu. You can also configure events whenever a specific menu item is clicked. Websites offering several products and services may find this plugin extremely helpful in integrating their offerings within the menu.
Responsive Select Menu - This plugin is best for automatically making your existing WordPress menus mobile-friendly. As soon as the plugin detects a mobile device, the menu is adjusted accordingly which takes less space and is better streamlined for better navigation in a limited space. It has several extra options that help you to properly configure dynamic rendering of mobile-friendly menus on different smartphones. The converted menus work seamlessly on touchscreen phones too.
Advanced Sidebar Menu - This powerful plugin is best-suited for category and custom pages to show group-based content in the sidebar. Once configured, it populates dynamically showing the most relevant links to the visitor. It has dozens of category and page options to customize the menu at your will. You can also customize the CSS associated with the sidebar menu to integrate it well with your theme. This plugin is best suitable for portals that are using WordPress to build a traditional page-oriented website.
WP-Parsi navigation trees - This extremely flexible plugin can be used to build dynamic expandable and collapsible menu from an existing WordPress menu. It's ideal for multilevel menus with lots of nested sub-menus. The configuration is extremely easy and all you need is simply dragging and dropping of widget and menu at the right place. This plugin is ideal for showcasing list of products in a collapsible menu in your blog's sidebar. You can also use it to create tree menus in your blog's footer.
Breadcrumb NavXT - This hugely popular plugin has a very large user base. Breadcrumbs make the entire navigation easy and are also recommended by Google. This handy plugin lets you integrate breadcrumbs navigation very easy. You can customize the navigational structure to suit your needs. This plugin also has a custom class that can be used by advanced users to come up with a more flexible and unique breadcrumbs navigation. It works with every theme without any conflict and helps you make your website more user-friendly.
BE Subpages Widget - If your blog or website have child pages for almost every important page, you can use this plugin to list them in the blog's sidebar in the form of a menu. The menus created by this plugin are dynamic in nature and are automatically populated with child pages whenever you visit a parent page. It also provides several filters for advanced users which can be used to customize the menu content. You can use this plugin for websites having multilevel page hierarchies that are logically connected with each other for completing a business process.
Folder Menu Vertical - This unique plugin lets you create a flash-based menu either from a new menu or from an existing WordPress menu. You can also fix the position of the menu such that it remains intact despite scrolling down the web page. You can also customize the position of the menu at your desired place. It has a good configuration interface that can be used to apply various flash effects to get a nice menu for your blog. While using this plugin, you must ensure that most of your visitors have flash-activated browsers else they won't be able to navigate through this menu.
