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How to style a WordPress navigation menu bar using CSS

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How to style a WordPress navigation menu bar using CSS WordPress template

Writing styles for navigation menus nowadays is mostly a routine job; after all, CSS has made strides in the last few years, we can even mimic hover-intent on menus without any JavaScript at all (a topic which we’ll cover on a dedicated tutorial).

WordPress isn’t much different, the native menu functionality is powerful and versatile enough to give us with exactly the HTML we’d require, plus a few more options for providing a better user experience to our users. The aim of this post is to take you through those and provide a complete solution on how to style a native WordPress navigation menu.

Adding a WordPress menu to our website

Displaying a nav menu on your WordPress site is generally very simple, it only takes a couple of lines:

<?php
  // functions.php
  register_nav_menus( array(
    'main' => __( 'Main Menu', 'mytheme' ),
  ) );
?>

<?php // somewhere in header.php ?>
<header class="header">
  <nav class="nav">
    <?php
      if ( has_nav_menu( 'main' ) ) {
        wp_nav_menu( array(
          'theme_location' => 'main-menu',
          'container'      => '',
          'menu_class'     => 'navigation-main',
        ) );
      }
    ?>
  </nav>
</header>
Adding a WordPress nav menu

Then all you have to do is go through the usual process of creating a menu and adding items to it via the admin dashboard.

For this tutorial we’ll assume our menu’s structure is as follows:

├── Home
├── Blog
|   ├── News
|   ├── Sports
|   ├── Fashion
|   |   ├── Article #1 Title
|   |   ├── Article #1 Title
|   ├── Business
├── About
└── Contact

So basically a menu of three levels (our final styles will support infinite nested levels). This would produce roughly the following markup:

<header class="header">
  <nav class="nav">
    <ul class="navigation-main">
      <li class="current-menu-item">
        <a href="#">Home</a>
      </li>
      <li class="menu-item-has-children">
        <a href="#">Blog</a>
        <ul>
          <li><a href="#">News</a></li>
          <li><a href="#">Sports</a></li>
          <li class="menu-item-has-children">
            <a href="#">Fashion</a>
            <ul>
              <li><a href="#">Article #1</a></li>
              <li><a href="#">Article #2</a></li>
            </ul>
          </li>
          <li><a href="#">Business</a></li>
        </ul>
      </li>
      <li><a href="#">About</a></li>
      <li><a href="#">Contact</a></li>
    </ul>
  </nav>
</header>
Final HTML markup

I said “roughly” before, and that’s because although the actual HTML structure will remain the same throughout our website, WordPress will add very specific classes depending on what page we’re currently viewing.

We need to keep in mind that WordPress adds the following three important classes to the menu’s <li> elements with the following rules:

  • .menu-item-has-children: Menu items that contain sub-items (just like “Blog” and “Fashion” in our example).
  • .current-menu-item: Menu items that correspond to the currently viewed page (so in our example we just opened the homepage as “Home” contains this class).
  • .current-menu-ancestor: Menu items that are ancestors (parents, grandparents) of the menu item which corresponds to the currently rendered page.

We’ll very soon see how to use these classes in our stylesheets.

WordPress also adds a few other classes that generally do not concern us in a normal menu, but can become useful in very specific use-cases so be sure to check them out.

Giving the menu some structure

With the markup in place it’s time to start styling our menu. We’ll be using Sass instead of vanilla CSS. Sass comes very handy here, especially in styling menus where there’s a lot of nesting involved. It’s extra useful because (as with most things in WordPress) we need to style everything on our menu under its main class namespace (.navigation-main). This will prevent our styles from “bleeding” out to other potential menus we might have in our theme.

In general, when I write styles for a navigational component with a complex functionality I like to split styles into blocks “structure/functionality” and “presentation/appearance” styles, even if that means that I have to be a bit more verbose or even duplicate some selectors. I’ve found that it provides a clear separation of concerns and becomes a much more maintainable paradigm, especially when the component’s presentational requirements become very complex (think animations, different colors for each sub-item, etc). We’re not going to deal with that kind of stuff right now, but it’s a good practice to have in mind when the CSS concerns are so cleanly separated in a particular isolated component such as this one.

.header {
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

.nav {
  width: 100%;
}

.navigation-main {
  //
  // Structural Styles
  //
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  list-style: none;
  width: 100%;
  text-align: center;

  ul {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    list-style: none;
    position: absolute;
    left: -999em; // "Hide" the sub-menus
  }
  
  li {
    display: inline-block;
    position: relative;
    text-align: left; // Reset text alignment

	// First sub-menus appear below the menu item
    &:hover {
      > ul {
        left: auto;
      }
    }
    
	// All other levels appear on the right
    li {
      display: block;
      
      &:hover {
        > ul {
          left: 100%;
          top: 0;
        }
      }
    }
  }
  
  //
  // Presentational Styles (we'll add them soon)
  //
}
The menu's main structural styles

This is all it takes to imbue the functionality of a standard navigation menu, and support infinite nested levels. We absolutely position all sub-menus, offset them out of screen (we don’t set their display property to “none”) and we reposition them on hover making them visible.

Here’s how this all looks:

Try hovering over “Blog”, and then “Fashion”.

It’s kinda ugly though, so let’s make it a bit prettier.

Adding appearance and visual clues to the menu

Pretty basic stuff, some background and link colors:

$background-color: #145474 !default;
$link-color: #fff !default;
$link-active-color: #ffcc03 !default;

.header {
  background-color: $background-color;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
}

.nav {
  width: 100%;
}

.navigation-main {
  //
  // Structural Styles
  //

  // Same as what we wrote before
  
  //
  // Presentational Styles
  //

  // Global menu link styles
  a {
    color: $link-color;
    text-decoration: none;
    display: block;
    white-space: nowrap;
    padding: 10px 15px;
  }
  
  // Active & hover styles
  a:hover {
    color: $link-active-color;
  }
  
  // Submenu styles
  ul {
    background-color: $background-color;
  }
}

And here’s how it looks now:

Although our menu is starting to look good it’s missing a couple of things which are quite important for a good user experience.

First of all, it would be nice if while the user hovers over different nav items their parents and ancestors remain highlighted. It helps with visual identification of the current hovered path and it just looks better, so let’s fix that with the following extra selector:

...

// Active & hover styles
a:hover,
li:hover > a { // This trick keeps all active nodes in the navigation path colored active
  color: $link-active-color;
}

...
Highlighting the currently hovered path

Secondly, we must highlight the nav items which correspond to the currently viewed page. That means that, if a user is at “Home” we should highlight the “Home” item, and if a user is viewing “Article #1” the menu should highlight all its ancestors up to and including “Blog”.

Here’s where the classes we mentioned before come into play, and it’s very simple to handle the above scenarios:

...
  
// Active & hover styles
a:hover,
li:hover > a,
.current-menu-item > a,
.current-menu-ancestor > a {
  color: $link-active-color;
}
  
...
Highlighting current menu items and their ancestors

Check out how “Home” now remains active and how if you navigate all the way through “Article #1” its ancestors will also stay highlighted:

Adding visual clues for items with children

It’s also a standard good practice to provide a visual clue (such as an arrow) for items with nested sub-menus. The tricky part here is that items belonging to the first level (main menu) should have arrows pointing down, while the rest should point right. As a final step let’s see how we’d go about this:

...

  // First level item arrows
  .menu-item-has-children {
    > a {
      &::before {
        content: "";
        position: absolute;
        right: 0;
        top: 50%;
        transform: translateY(-50%);
        border: 4px solid transparent;
        border-top-color: currentColor; // Nifty trick to always keep the arrow colored the same as the menu item's text in every different state 
      }
    }
  }
  
  // Second level item arrows
  ul {
    .menu-item-has-children {
      > a {
        &::before {
          right: 2px;
          border-top-color: transparent;
          border-left-color: currentColor;
        }
      }
    }
  }
  
...
Adding dropdown arrows

Note that I’m creating CSS triangles with the border trick but you’re free to use whatever you wish, e.g. FontAwesome icons (fa-angle-down is a good choice).

And the result:

Pretty good! Looks like we’re all done with our menu, perfectly styled and ready for deployment.

Going the extra mile: Making the menu accessible

Our menu is pretty much finished but it would be awesome if we could make it accessible to keyboard users, navigating with the tab button. For this we’ll need to write some very basic JavaScript and only add a couple of classes to our CSS:

jQuery(function ($) {
  var siteNavigation = $('.navigation-main');
  
  siteNavigation.find( 'a' ).on( 'focus blur', function() {
    $( this ).parents( 'li' ).toggleClass( 'focus' );
  });
});
Making the menu accessible is easy!

This toggles a class on a menu item every time we focus on its link. This way we can simply alter our CSS to display the sub-menus when that class is present:

...

  li {
    display: inline-block;
    position: relative;
    text-align: left; // Reset text alignment

    &.focus, // Display the menus both on hover and when .focus is present!
    &:hover {
      > ul {
        left: auto;
      }
    }
    
    li {
      display: block;
      
      &.focus,
      &:hover {
        > ul {
          left: 100%;
          top: 0;
        }
      }
    }
  }

...

  a:hover,
  li:hover > a,
  .focus > a, // And color them as well
  .current-menu-item > a,
  .current-menu-ancestor > a {
    color: $link-active-color;
  }

...

And we’re done! Let’s look at a complete example with more nested levels and the current menu item on a lower level than the main menu. Try hovering over and tabbing through and it should all work great!

Let us know in the comments how you prefer to style your WordPress menus or any tips and tricks you might have up your sleeve, and, oh! if you’d also like to convert your menu into a mobile drawer for mobile devices we’ve got you covered :)

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63 responses to “How to style a WordPress navigation menu bar using CSS”

  1. Amaechi amanda says:
    January 13, 2018 at 7:43 am

    Thanks i must say am using it on my blog now and the menu is awesome

    Reply
  2. Mavislibrary says:
    February 10, 2018 at 4:56 pm

    Thanks For THis article. With this, i can be able to modify and make some changes on my theme by myself.

    Reply
  3. Feeroz Hasan says:
    April 19, 2018 at 11:20 am

    Hello, Sir,
    Kindly solve my problem. I am using Unconditional WordPress theme. It doesn’t support the second level of the menu. I am not able to navigate to subpages. I like this theme and don’t want to change it but the sub-menu problem is existing.
    Kindly help.

    Regards

    Reply
  4. AI Sudin says:
    July 28, 2018 at 8:14 pm

    Great post. Extremely helpful. But how can we make this menu responsive?

    Reply
    • Vassilis Mastorostergios says:
      July 31, 2018 at 10:27 am

      Thanks for the kind comments! Making a menu responsive is kind of a custom deal as you’d need to know your requirements before doing so, you could get away with a simple display: block on everything and implement some JavaScript in order to hide/show the menu entirely on click or you can use the magnificent jQuery mmenu plugin http://mmenu.frebsite.nl/ which is our choice as well.

      Reply
  5. Ikechukwu says:
    July 29, 2018 at 7:48 pm

    I was able to modify my theme a little bit if customize it to my test using this particular guide.
    But I have a question to ask. Is it possible for Google to stop indexing your blog when a new theme is installed?
    Since I installed the theme my post is not coming up

    Reply
  6. Rohi Arora says:
    December 12, 2018 at 7:24 am

    Thanks for the article. How we can expand this code to mega menu?

    Reply
    • Vassilis Mastorostergios says:
      December 13, 2018 at 3:14 pm

      Heya, glad you liked it. Implementing a mega menu is a bit more involved to fit in a comment, plus there’s all sorts of different mega menus around (images etc) so generally it’s up to the developer to do it, but the logic remains the same pretty much, in your child ul > li elements add a div element and content inside it :)

      Reply
  7. Emily says:
    December 21, 2018 at 1:17 am

    Hi, this was very helpful, as I’m just getting into CSS as I help a friend of mine with his business website (wordpress). One thing that has been bugging me though is the navigation “block”. There are 20 categories with dropdowns. It’s currently set to float, so it’s only taking up 4 rows on the page, but the “justification” is to the left. Just for aesthetic purposes, is there a way to set the navigation block so that each line of links is “centered” – so there’s the same amount of “padding” on the left and right of each line?

    Reply
    • Vassilis Mastorostergios says:
      January 21, 2019 at 7:30 am

      Hiya, you’d have to set display: flex on the ul.navigation and then justify-content: space-between.

      Reply
  8. pierre says:
    January 8, 2019 at 3:15 pm

    Hello,

    Thank you for the tuto !
    I’ve got two probleme :
    The submenu disappear when the mouse left the parent element of the submenu. So when the mouse flies over an submenu item, the submenu disappear.
    The other probleme is the z-index. I don’t anderstand why the menu is under the other elements of the page, I think the probleme is dependant of my theme OKAB but if you have an issue for me it would be cool.

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Vassilis Mastorostergios says:
      January 11, 2019 at 11:26 am

      For the first issue I think you’ve added some kind of `margin` on your parent submenu elements and as such while the pointer leaves the element it loses hover state. Please try to check if you have some kind of margin and replace it with padding if possible.

      For the second issue unfortunately there’s no way to help you directly, you need to check which element has a higher z-index and what that z-index is and adjust the menu to use a higher one!

      Reply
    • Isaac says:
      January 17, 2019 at 12:13 am

      Are you using wordpress v5 ?

      Reply
  9. Stevo says:
    January 22, 2019 at 12:32 pm

    I must confess, this post is helpful to me.

    Reply
  10. Saheed says:
    January 31, 2019 at 10:07 pm

    Thank you very much for this post, I was able to fix some issues with it. Keep up the good work here.

    Reply
  11. Victor says:
    March 14, 2019 at 10:14 pm

    What a great work there, it works perfectly well on my blog. Thanks

    Reply
  12. Vicky says:
    March 22, 2019 at 10:08 pm

    What a great work there, it works perfectly well on my blog. Thanks

    Reply
  13. Frank Daniel says:
    June 12, 2019 at 11:15 am

    this guide worked perfectly for me
    i love this blog
    i hope to find another solution to my blog problem

    Reply
  14. ema jame says:
    June 23, 2019 at 11:17 pm

    you just solve my problem I thank you ones again i love your website keep it up have bookmarked it

    Reply
  15. Prince Daniel says:
    August 6, 2019 at 11:20 pm

    What a great guide there, it works perfectly well on my blog. Thanks

    Reply
  16. Master says:
    August 18, 2019 at 1:37 am

    Thanks for sharing

    Reply
  17. Usulor says:
    August 20, 2019 at 9:59 pm

    Wow! This is a great guide, this is what I have been searching for but actually I found it here, thanks bro.

    Reply
  18. aadhi says:
    August 23, 2019 at 12:19 pm

    hi i need a solution for how to make navbars active for their respective pages in wordpress

    Reply
  19. John says:
    September 19, 2019 at 7:55 pm

    Thanks for sharing this information with us it really helped me understand

    Reply
  20. Peace David says:
    September 19, 2019 at 10:29 pm

    you just solve my problem I thank you ones again i love your website keep it up have bookmarked it

    Reply
  21. Oyeniyi Michael says:
    October 4, 2019 at 10:04 am

    Really good here, styling a WordPress website following your guide makes it super simple.

    Reply
  22. john John says:
    October 4, 2019 at 10:05 am

    wow, thanks man, you made everything easy for me, styling my blog to my taste hasn’t been easy

    Reply
  23. Collins Bolt says:
    October 7, 2019 at 4:43 pm

    Hello,

    Thank you for the tuto !
    I’ve got two probleme :
    The submenu disappear when the mouse left the parent element of the submenu. So when the mouse flies over an submenu item, the submenu disappear.
    The other probleme is the z-index. I don’t anderstand why the menu is under the other elements of the page, I think the probleme is dependant of my theme OKAB but if you have an issue for me it would be cool.

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Vassilis Mastorostergios says:
      December 29, 2019 at 7:59 pm

      Hello, we’d have to have some kind of code example or url to help out with the issue if there’s one available.

      Reply
  24. Thompson says:
    November 19, 2019 at 6:04 pm

    Thanks for bringing up this article

    Reply
  25. Joe says:
    November 28, 2019 at 12:02 am

    Thanks for sharing this

    Reply
  26. Joyous says:
    November 28, 2019 at 12:03 am

    I really appreciate your time and effort on this article because it full of valuable information

    Reply
  27. Thompson says:
    January 7, 2020 at 2:44 pm

    Please i need more update till on this topic

    Reply
  28. Ekijazzy says:
    January 18, 2020 at 6:15 pm

    Very detailed article, I think with this i can actually modify and make some changes on my theme by myself.

    Reply
  29. Roberta says:
    January 20, 2020 at 8:50 pm

    How to set it up for mobile as well? Adding some kind of “hamburger” style where the menu is collapsed on mobile devices, using a css break.

    Is that possible?

    Reply
    • Nik says:
      February 4, 2020 at 10:08 am

      Hello Roberta.
      This process is a bit more involved and outside the scope of this guide I’m afraid. However I can offer some info to help you proceed. On our themes we tend to use mmenu.js to help us with mobile menus. The site has quite a lot of information and examples on how to implement it on your site, and it also offers a WordPress plugin.

      Reply
  30. Someone says:
    September 14, 2020 at 1:21 am

    Well where do u post all these css codes?

    Reply
    • Vassilis Mastorostergios says:
      September 14, 2020 at 1:23 am

      Hello! Typically you would put them in your theme’s style.css or even better a child-theme’s style.css.

      Reply
  31. Eddy Abasiada says:
    September 24, 2020 at 9:53 pm

    If I update the theme, hope it would not be overriden?

    Reply
    • Nik says:
      October 12, 2020 at 8:48 am

      Hello Eddy.
      If you edited theme files directly then I’m afraid the answer is yes, if you update the theme changes will be lost. All changes should be made in a child theme (here’s a guide on how to create one) so they can be preserved after an update. If you only need CSS for your modifications you can place it in the “Additional CSS” section under Appearance -> Customize, this way you can preserve CSS changes without the need of a child theme.

      Reply
  32. Joe Smith says:
    November 13, 2020 at 2:00 am

    Sincerely I would say this site has been helpful

    Reply
  33. Paul says:
    November 13, 2020 at 2:01 am

    Hello I cannot login my account anymore please help

    Reply
  34. John says:
    November 13, 2020 at 2:02 am

    I would say this is the best site ever

    Reply
  35. Oliver Smith says:
    April 7, 2021 at 5:35 pm

    Hi,

    What you Recommend the CSS which can load faster ? I have a blog where my sites load is too slow according to Google page speed site.

    Reply
    • Nik says:
      April 13, 2021 at 6:19 pm

      Hello Oliver.
      You could try plugins like Autoptimize to minify and concatenate styles and scripts, additionally you could check out caching plugins for WordPress.
      Best regards.

      Reply
  36. imolite says:
    May 30, 2021 at 4:01 pm

    Your article was really impressive. Do keep post like this…

    Reply
  37. John Jiménez says:
    May 31, 2021 at 11:41 am

    Hey man,

    A lot of thanks 4 ur coding, was very usefull and simple, I am retaken stuff about css and remember than before I had a lot of work with make this menu, but you really make it easier…

    Thx man…

    Reply
  38. Pastquestionpdf says:
    December 25, 2021 at 2:12 am

    A pretty useful tutorial. Still very useful even in 2022.

    Reply
  39. Emmaneul says:
    January 7, 2022 at 8:15 am

    Very informative, Thanks for sharing. I think with this i can actually modify and make some changes on my theme by myself.

    Reply
  40. sam35 says:
    January 8, 2023 at 10:45 pm

    can this still work for for my work

    Reply

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