Have you ever thought of customizing your blog page and extend the WordPress blog features? Do you know how to add posts to pages in WordPress? As you may know, WordPress uses its homepage as the default blog page, and all your posts will be displayed on a single page. The issues may some webmasters encounter with is customizing their post pages and custom menu for better arrangement. In this post, we are going to show you how to add different custom menus to your website and define different pages for showing the posts.
How to customize the WordPress menu and add posts to pages?
Creating posts and pages in WordPress
Let’s get our hands dirty and begin to customize the WordPress menu. First, we need to have our posts and pages created. In your admin dashboard, go to the Pages section and click Add New. Create two pages named Blog and Homepage.
Now, let’s create our posts. Head to Add New Post in the Posts section in the admin dashboard sidebar menu. Create as many posts as you want. Don’t forget to assign categories to them. I have recently published an article with the subject of creating categories in WordPress. Having categories makes your posts more organized and more accessible. Moreover, users can access your posts through your categories.
Now that the first job is done, let’s go even further.
Building a navigation menu
WordPress allows you to create multiple navigation menus for your header, sidebar, and footer. Moreover, you can manage your navigation menus based on pages, posts, and categories. Therefore, it makes your menus more practical and accessible.
Go to Menus settings through the Appearance tab in the admin dashboard. Select a name for your menu and check Top Menu in the Display location if you want your menu to be displayed as the main menu.
Different strategies can be selected based on your UX design for showing different items in your menu bar. First, you can choose the pages in the items list and drag them through the structure window. Moreover, you can arrange the items by their parent/child relationship. To do so, drag the child item a little bit to the right side for selecting it as the sub-item.
For other alternative strategies, you can choose your demanded categories to be shown in the main menu as well. Hence, do the same process to fulfill that goal. You can specify the location of your top and social links menu, in the Manage Location tab. For creating a new menu, click create a new menu in the Edit Menus tab. Moreover, you can select from pre-built menus in the same location.
For showing the menu in the correct pages, you need to define your home and blog page for WordPress. For this purpose, head to Settings > Reading in the admin dashboard. As you can see, the default homepage displays are based on your latest posts. Therefore, to change the default configuration, select A static page item to turn on the Home and Posts page options.
Assign home and blog pages to these options. Hence, WordPress shows your pages in the correct way.
Conclusion
It seems easy, but it may be a big challenge for a wide range of webmasters to customize their menu and website arrangements.
What has been mentioned here is a quick review of the first steps that you should work on before going further. Hence, based on your activated theme, you may see different options and UI for showing the navigation menu.
