List of Best WordPress Menu Plugins (2023)

Want to design multi-layered, sophisticated menus for your website? Building and styling website menus are easily accomplished with the WordPress Menu Plugins. With the best WordPress Menu Plugin work is done easily.

The WordPress Themes and Theme Frameworks provide an excellent system to design great-looking website menus. However, the modern Navigation Menus, seem to be strikingly different from the menus that were in use a few years back. Additionally, the WordPress themes and customizations continue to provide menus that work with the theme concept. Mega Menus are the way ahead for larger sites with lots of pages for diverse products or services. With WordPress menu plugins you can add highly responsive, extremely attractive and device friendly mega menus into your websites. Menus being the starting point of website navigation, are an essential website component from the users’ perspective. Both from an aesthetic or navigational ease viewpoint, a visually striking menu is critical for the website designer.

WordPress Responsive Menus

Notably, the website menu is one of the most significant elements of a website as it aids page navigation. Moreover, it directs your users across the web pages and helps them navigate from page to page. Also, the website menu defines the choices presented to the site users. By clicking on a chosen menu item the user is directed to a defined web page or action. Menus being the starting point of website navigation, are an essential website component from the users’ perspective. Both from an aesthetic or navigational ease viewpoint, a visually striking menu is critical for the website designer.

Menus are of various types and you would ideally choose one depending upon the number of pages and overall website design.

• Horizontal Menus appear at the top of a web page and the remaining space is reserved for the main content. It is intuitive to use as most people prefer to read text horizontally.
• Vertical Menus are used alone or in combination with horizontal menus. Again these are primarily used when the menu content cannot be fit horizontally across the page.
• Dropdown Menus can be used with both horizontal and vertical menus. These separate the visible main menu items from sub-menu items that appear only on mouse hover on the main menu.
• Mega Menus are big, 2-D panels that are grouped by navigation options. As well as, they are a relatively new concept and are gaining popularity since the complete menu is visible at once with no scrolling. These are a combination of simple and drop-down menus and are similar to the ribbon in Microsoft Office.

WordPress Menu Plugins

Identically, WordPress by itself provides built-in features to create the different types of menus. However, these features are generic and do not enable you to implement advanced mega menu systems. Equally, the WordPress Menu Plugins integrate with your existing WordPress menu system and provide additional capabilities. Moreover, the plugins help to design professional looking Mega Menus that further enhance the users’ menu experience. Most menu plugins have a built-in admin panel to add or modify menu elements stylized with your website design. Furthermore, these provide customization menu options for fonts, colours, background texture/colours, icons etc. Not to mention the shortcode elements allow for adding contact forms, images, videos, google maps & dynamic contents into your menus. Additionally, most WordPress Mega Menu plugins are optimized to work with multiple devices. As well, these plugins include multiple menu support along with hover effects and other menu animations.

Here at TemplateToaster offline website builder software, you can see 5 popular Mega Menu Plugins for WordPress that provide a vast array of options. We also list a few others that offer in-depth usage for advanced web designers.

List of the Best WordPress Menu Plugins of 2023

1. Max Mega Menu
2. Responsive menu
3. WP Responsive Menu
4. Menu Shortcode
5. Nextend Accordion Menu
6. WR Mega Menu
7. Menu Icons
8. WordPress “Custom Menu” widget
9. Bootstrap Menu
10. Menu Duplicator
11. Sticky Menu

Best WordPress Menu Plugins Comparison Chart (2023)

The Best WordPress Menu Plugins in Detail

1. Max Mega Menu (Free & Paid)

Max Mega Menu plugin is a complete menu management plugin. With complete ease, one can modify an existing menu into a user-friendly, fully accessible and responsive menu. In the same fashion, the options include built-in settings to restyle, add widgets, change behaviour and convert menus into mega menus. Equally important this WordPress Menu Plugin supports custom menu styling, drag and drop menu builder and a built-in theme editor in its free version. Uniquely the plugin supports customizable menu transitions and a built-in theme editor. As the Max Mega Menu Pro adds features like Vertical, Accordion Menus, Menu Logo, Google Font support, WooCommerce and EDD support.

2. Responsive Menu (Paid)

In the first place, this is a highly customizable responsive menu plugin for WordPress. And the interface is easy to use and gives you a multitude of customizable options. Additionally, various choices for customizing the menus include menu type, background image, menu animations, menu alignment and placement, screen size. Moreover, with its free version, the Responsive Menu plugin provides capabilities such as menu logos, re-order components, include scripts, custom menu triggers. Another add-on is the inclusion of unit tests which can be effortlessly run by the user. The Advanced and Pro functionality provides support for design preview, menu item animation, integrated header bar and more.

3. WP Responsive Menu (Paid)

The WP Responsive Menu Plugin is a highly customizable mobile menu plugin. Also, the plugin helps to convert your existing WordPress menus into fully responsive, elegant looking sliding menus. This plugin easily integrates with the WordPress menu system and works on all types of mobile devices. Moreover, the free version provides an easy to use admin interface. And it offers an array of options and the ability to show categories, sub-categories, and posts. Besides, the plugin provides built-in support for adding custom colours, menu logos, hiding specific elements on mobile devices and swiping gestures.

4. Nextend Accordion Menu (Free & Paid)

The Nextend Accordion Menu plugin is user-friendly, highly customizable and easy to integrate WordPress Menu Plugin. The Accordion Menu enables you to use different levels of submenus. The accordion menu plugin provides complete control over the menu, levels, colours, animation effects. It can be used to build a custom accordion menu from any WordPress menu. The Lite version comes with one theme. The 3 extra themes are available to be purchased with the PRO version of the plugin. The list of powerful features also includes complete control over colours, backgrounds, images, fonts. There are also added multiple menu levels and integrated Google fonts support.

5. WR Mega Menu

The WR Mega Menu Plugin by WooRockets is a powerful, responsive, User-Oriented Plugin. This WordPress menu plugin provides you with a dedicated and intuitive menu builder. This provides complete control over designing and customizing the menu. The additional main features of this responsive menu plugin are user-friendly menu builder, multiple screen size, device support and drag-drop. Also supported are menu orientation and icon display options, live preview, and profiles for menu settings. You may also embed rich content and choose to embed Google Fonts from the plug-in dashboard.

The above-listed WordPress menu plugins are well-known and highly rated WordPress Menu Plugins. These popular WordPress menu plugins are overloaded with features to support building mega menus.

Bonus WordPress Menu Plugins

WordPress plugin repository also has an assortment of plugins available for advanced users. Additionally, these provide specific functionality for further enhancing your WordPress Menus.

6. A boosted version of the WordPress “Custom Menu” widget is the WordPress Custom Menu Plugin. Use this to show menu branches or levels with full customization by adding a shortcode.

7. Theme developers who need multiple menus to be formatted as bootstrap menus can use the flexible, easy to use WordPress Bootstrap Menu Plugin.

8. WordPress Menu Duplicator Plugin allows you to duplicate menus from the backend. Just select the menu from the plugins settings page and input the new menu name for the duplicated menu. Add HTML sections and dynamically generated links to your navigation menus by using WordPress shortcodes.

9. The WordPress Menu Shortcode Plugin allows you to add shortcodes to WordPress Menus.

10. Enhance the look of your menus with the WordPress Menu Icons Plugin to adorn the navigation menus with attractive icons.

11. Also available in the WordPress Sticky Menu Plugin, a lightweight plugin to make your menu or header sticky on top of the page. This increases usability and the number of page views since the menu is available to the user at all times.

Tool to Design WordPress Responsive Menu

For busy designers, it becomes cumbersome to install and manage multiple plugins that cater to varying requirements. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind the usability and user-friendly aspect when designing a user interface. Usually, most web designers prefer to work on the designs and let a tool or framework manage the intricate details. TemplateToaster is one such WordPress website builder that provides multiple capabilities for creating WordPress websites. Identically the tool also provides WordPress Sticky Menu Plugin, a lightweight plugin to make your menu or header sticky on top of advanced and eye-catching functionality keeping the internal details away from the designers.

Let us take a look at TemplateToaster as a Menu design tool. We will go into the details of Menu configuration and how-to step-by-step create a menu system.

TemplateToaster Menu Tab

Figure 1:  Menu Tab

The TemplateToaster Menu Tab includes the various designing elements of the Menu. It is used to add Menus to themes, templates or websites and contains options such as:

• Suggest Menu
• Menu Position
• Colour
• Foreground Image
• Text Area
• Sub-menus
• Height of Menu Buttons
• Width
• Margin

The tool allows you to create both Normal Menus and Mega Menus. The Menu Type is selected from the Layout option in the SubMenu tab of the Menu Tab. As seen in Figure 2, there are 3 options for a menu type – Mega, Vertical and Horizontal.

Figure 2: Menu Options

Normal Menu

A Normal Menu is the classic Menu and is either Horizontal or Vertical. As seen in Figure 2, the “Services” menu tab has a vertically placed “Web Services” submenu.

Figure 3: Normal Menu

How to Create a Responsive Menu in WordPress

• Select the Menu Position from the “Menu Position” option in the Menu Tab.
• Select the Height, Width, Color and other Menu attributes from the Menu Tab.
• Add a Page from the Pages Panel and preview the Menu created above.
• Click on the Layout option in the Submenu tab of the Menu Tab.
• Select Menu Type as Horizontal or Vertical.
• Select other attributes from Submenu Container, Submenu Item, and Submenu Headings.
• Click on any tab on the Main Menu to verify the submenu placement.

Mega Menu

A Mega Menu is a grouped Menu and is either Horizontal or Vertical. As seen in Figure 4, the “Services” menu tab is Mega Menu with multiple submenus.

Figure 4: Mega Menu 

Steps to Create Mega Menus

• Select the Menu Position from the “Menu Position” option in the Menu Tab.

• Select the Height, Width, Color and other Menu attributes from the Menu Tab.
• Add a Page from the Pages Panel and preview the Menu created above.
• Click on the Layout option in the Submenu tab of the Menu Tab.
• Select Menu Type as Mega.
• Select other attributes from Submenu Container, Submenu Item, and Submenu Headings.
• Click on any tab on the Main Menu to verify the submenu placement.

How to Pick the Best WordPress Menu Plugins?

Now, that you have a complete list of the best WordPress menu plugins, it might get a bit confusing and overwhelming at once. Here I have mentioned a few criteria that you need to check in while picking the best WordPress menu plugin.

• First of all, you need to check the responsiveness of the plugin. Therefore, make sure it works well on all devices. As a result, it should automatically adjust with the size of different devices.
• To be sure, menus should not interfere with the speed of your website. Website speed plays a crucial role in SEO and ranking. Therefore, select a menu plugin that is built with a strong code base and optimized for website speed.
• Select a plugin that is developed and build under a notable and well-established web developer.
• If you are going to install a plugin from an external site, then check the coding for security.
• Lastly, it is always good to check for genuine reviews and ratings of the users. Check for feedbacks

Which WordPress Menu Plugins you are going to Select?

The point to consider when selecting a WordPress Menu Plugins is that page navigation adds value to the users’ experience. Most times a complex menu hierarchy actually confuses the user. If you are an experienced web designer, then WordPress Menu Plugins provide a viable option for you to create the website menus. With WordPress Menu plugins, it is however not that simple to create mega menus. It takes a time to add elements to every single column in the menu. However, using shortcodes in the mega menus too might not be too easy for novice users. It is an all-in-one solution that requires minimal effort to design and create menus. This WordPress theme builder provides all that you get with a WordPress Menu Plugins and lots of additional functionality that is easy to use and customize. Check out WordPress header plugins.