9 Best WordPress Menu Plugins to Extend WordPress’ Built-In Menu Functionality

Juliet D'cruz

Updated on:

There are a lot of things you need to consider when creating a WordPress website. One of them is making a menu, an essential element that helps users navigate your website with ease. 

While most WordPress themes come with their default menu and navigational functionalities, they are rarely practical and efficient. That’s why people have created menu plugins. Their sole purpose is to provide additional functionality beyond the default WordPress menu feature.

Menu plugins allow you to create mega menus to add more information to the menu. They also make the menus responsive and help them adapt to various screen sizes. 

With that said, this article will provide you with nine of the best WordPress Menu Plugins to help you extend WordPress’s built-in menu functionality. For additional information on building a WordPress website, check out this WordPress tutorial.

Let’s get started. 

click here – Guide to Becoming a Talent Agent

  1. Max Mega Menu

Max Mega Menu is a free and widely used WordPress plugin that helps to configure your menu to fit your style. However, if you want to get more advanced features, you’ll need to upgrade to the business or pro version. 

Don’t worry though, because this free version already provides a lot of valuable features, such as:

  • Multiple menu locations, each coming with its own configurations.
  • Ability to display WordPress widgets directly on the menu. 
  • Support of several formats, including submenus, flyouts, vertical forms, and tabbed menus. 
  • Customization of the menu style using their built-in theme editor. 
  • Several animations and movements like fades, hovers, and slides. 

If you want to upgrade to the premium version and receive advanced tools, the price starts at $19.99 per year. 

  1. WP Responsive Menu

WP Responsive Menu is a plugin that mainly optimizes for mobile devices. Its specialty is creating sliding mobile menus. It has an intuitive GUI and comes with free and premium versions. The free version doesn’t offer many features but instead only creates responsive templates and logo placement.

If you opt to pay $25 for a single site per year, you’ll unlock a wide range of features, such as:

  • Full responsiveness on all kinds of mobile devices. 
  • Easy to set up and has a user-friendly admin interface. 
  • When in responsive mode (mobile mode), the tool will hide any unwanted or cluttering elements, leaving only the vital elements in the display. 
  • It supports swipe gestures and also allows you to enable or disable the pinch to zoom feature. 
  1. QuadMenu

The QuadMenu plugin offers a free and straightforward way to add and customize your menus on your website. It’s mobile-friendly and offers some responsive features as well. 

Some of its features include:

  • Support of Google Fonts and animation styles.
  • An automatic menu integration option. 
  • A drag-and-drop editor.
  • Support of child themes and offers hundreds of vertical, horizontal, and off-canvas mega menu themes. 
  • Ability to display widgets, icons, social menus, and tabs as well. 
  • Customizable breakpoints for menu collapse. 

click here – 5 Tips for Improving Customer Safety At Your Establishment

  1. WP Mega Menu

WP Mega Menu is a free menu plugin that offers many features usually seen on the paid versions of other plugins. It allows you to place a logo, background image, search bar, and also create your own menu themes and apply them on different menus on your website.

It utilizes a drag-and-drop interface and has user-friendly navigation. Some of its features include:

  • The ability to export and import custom themes.
  • Ability to integrate social media icons. 
  • Google Fonts and Font Awesome Icons support. 
  • Ability to add unlimited options.
  • Mobile responsiveness support. 
  • Ability to add products to your menus. 
  • Animation effects. 
  1. UberMenu

UberMenu is a premium and stunning mega menu plugin made for all types of devices. Starting at just $21 as a one-time fee, this plugin offers a range of amazing features. Some of those features are:

  • A grid system built-in and individual layout control, allowing you to create the menu layouts easily. 
  • Support for advanced features like maps, contact forms, search bars and allows you to implement your own custom code to showcase anything in the menu. 
  • A wide range of pre-designed templates and integration to WordPress Customizer with more than 50 configurable settings. 
  • The AJAX saving features ensure that you never lose your work. 
  • Ability to organize your submenus, posts, categories into tabs easily. 
  • A dedicated shop menu to add products, featured images, categories, and cart summary to the menu bar. 
  1. Hero Menu

Hero Menu is a premium menu plugin that’s known for its user-friendly interface. It has various fully responsive menu templates and a great drag-and-drop builder. This plugin is meant for both complex and straightforward mega menus. 

With just $20 per year, you get plenty of features. Some of them are:

  • 60+ color presets.
  • Ability to include featured images from your blog posts using links. 
  • The plugin directly connects to WooCommerce and allows you to add additional elements like a shopping cart. 
  • It’s very customizable, with plenty of settings for you to tweak. 
  • Ability to place the menu anywhere on your website. 
  • An extensive library of icons, fonts, and elements. 
  1. WP Mobile Menu

WP Mobile Menu is a plugin for creating mobile responsive menus for your website. This plugin offers unique premium features like a header banner, sliding menus, and a copyright section. 

While the free version provides enough functionality, the premium version opens up many more exclusive features that are worthwhile for companies looking to create different menus for each page. The price starts at $4.99 per month, and with that, you unlock features like:

  • Various WooCommerce elements, like mobile product filter, menu cart icon, and account links in the sliding cart. 
  • Footer menus and header banners.
  • Access to over 2000 icons.
  • Ability to import and export menus to and from other websites. 
  • Ability to create multi-level menus.
  • Animated icons. 
  1. Mega Main Menu

Mega Main Menu is one of the most affordable premium menu plugins that offer as many features as its more expensive counterparts. Starting at $16 per year, this plugin provides a wide range of options. 

Some of their other features include:

  • A demo dashboard that allows you to test out and see whether you like the menu interface.
  • Ability to create sticky menus with just a click of a button. 
  • Access to more than 1600 vector icons. 
  • Unlimited colors to choose from. 
  • Compatibility with WooCommerce, Bootstrap, and WPML.
  • Ability to add your own images, icons, and logos. 
  • Helps generate aesthetically pleasing dropdown menus swiftly.
  1. Superfly

Superfly is a free menu plugin that’s known for its beautiful vertical menus. The plugin can also generate unique side menus helping your website stand out from the competition. Since it specializes in a vertical design, this plugin is especially popular for mobile devices.

Some of the features include:

  • A full-screen view when creating the menu to avoid unnecessary distractions. 
  • Aesthetically pleasing animation options. 
  • Ability to add shortcodes for additional uniqueness.
  • Responsiveness on various screen sizes. 
  • Enhanced mobile support and rich menu settings.
  • Easy-to-use admin panel.

Conclusion

Website navigation plays a vital role in how your website is perceived. It’s also a crucial aspect to determine customer satisfaction and bounce rates. If users take too much time to find what they are looking for, they might leave your site and never return. Hence it’s vital to have an interactive and practical menu on your website.

Hence, I’ve provided nine menu plugins to help you craft great menus that will allow users to quickly find what they’re looking for and see what else your website offers using additional elements that aren’t available on the default WordPress menu layout.

All that’s left is to choose a menu plugin and enhance your menu layout and functionality for greater customer satisfaction.

Good luck!