WordPress 5.9 has soared in popularity since its release on January 25. Users across the globe are harnessing its new features to reinvent their sites, with customizations made fast, fun, and seamless thanks to full site editing and block themes. Now, everything from headers and footers to images and buttons exists as blocks, making them easy to add, remove, relocate, and customize.
One of the hallmarks of WordPress 5.9 and block themes is the new navigation block, a feature that simplifies menus on your site.
The New Navigation Experience
Simply put, navigation blocks are the menus that allow users to navigate your site. These menus can include links to “Home,” “About Me,” “Blog,” “Contact,” and other pages.
With the navigation menu now functioning as a block, you have greater control over its structure and design — far more than in older versions of WordPress.
Previously, you could add a menu on the back-end of your site, under Appearance > Menus. While you could edit the menu structure, including adding new pages and sub-menu options, design customization wasn’t available. And, it was hard to get a feel for what the menu looked like without saving your work and previewing your site.
With WP 5.9’s full site editing, adding and customizing menus is a much more visual experience. It’s easy to see what your menu will look like as you create it via the site editor. And, of course, there are plenty of customization options.
Complete Customization
You’re free to play with design as well as structure in navigation blocks. It was always possible to rearrange your links and add sub-menus, but now you’re in control of so much more. Color, font, font-weight, alignment — the list goes on and they’re all within your control. You can even choose between a few mobile responsiveness options, ensuring your site looks great from any device. You can add other blocks within the navigation block, such as your site icon, search bar, and social buttons.
In short, navigation blocks empower you to create a wholly-unique menu — one that meets your site needs and reflects your brand.
How To Navigation Blocks
Like most aspects of WordPress 5.9, adding and customizing navigation blocks is simple.
Add a Navigation Block
First, go to Appearance > Editor (beta). Click the Add button (the small “+” in the top left corner) and search for Navigation. Or, in an existing paragraph block, type “/Navigation” to add the navigation block.
Add Links to the Navigation Block
There are a few different ways to add page links to your navigation menu. Once you add your navigation block, choose “Select menu,” “Add all pages,” or “Start empty.”
“Select menu” allows you to reuse a previously created menu, even within a different theme. (That’s right, you can reuse your navigation blocks across themes!)
“Add all pages” automatically inserts links to every page you’ve created on your site. Then you can rearrange, rename, and otherwise edit the links as you’d like. Also, if you ever add a new page, the navigation block automatically updates to include it.
And finally, “Start empty” is a blank slate to create your menu from scratch. Select the pages you want and ignore the pages you don’t.
As a bonus tip, be sure to check out List View as you edit the structure of your navigation menu. List View is especially helpful if you have an extensive menu with many links and sub-menu links.
Navigation Like Never Before
As you can see, it’s fast and seamless to add and customize a navigation menu block in full site editing. It goes without saying, a menu is vital for your site’s usability. Entice your visitors to explore the most important pages on your site by creating an attractive and user-friendly menu. With WordPress 5.9, it’s never been easier to do just that.
