Custom Menus are unusable

  • I’m a long time WordPress user and never used menus, but I wanted to start with them now, because my navigation was getting clumsy. I have over 800 pages and sadly creating a menu is a near impossible task, so let me tell what I think is wrong with the custom menus screen:
    1) Search function is completely broken and doesn’t find any relevant pages, even if searched exactly with the same name (seems to search the content of the page which is not helpful)
    2) Shows no hierarchy – I have many pages with the same name under different pages (e.g. Submenu 1 -> “Test Page”, Submenu 2 -> “Test Page”) and I don’t know which page is which until added (especially notable when searching). Curiously, hierarchy is shown for my local test site which only has ~3 pages, making me think this may be a bug when there are too many pages?
    3) There should be an option to sort the whole menu (and/or submenus) alphabetically
    4) Only top level sites will be added to the menu if checked, not subpages. This is inconsistent – why?
    5) The “add sites” box is way too small, makes no sense since there is a lot of wasted space underneath it (even if the other boxes are checked)
    6) Adding pages to the menu should be possible through the “edit pages” screen (maybe combined with #4)

    These things sadly prevent me from making a custom menu and sticking with the automatically created default menu and adding redirects/hiding pages with third party plugins. Just wanted to leave this feedback here so the menu system can be improved in the future.

    Anyway, thanks for listening!

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  • Hi there! Thanks for writing in.

    Menus are a good navigation tool for including few important pages of your website, certainly not 800 pages all linked through them. As a user it is a terrible experience to snake through the hierarchy for such a large number of menu items.

    The solution here would be to group the 800 items into say 10 categories / pages with the links to the items, and have these categories/ pages linked from the menu instead.

    The way menus are displayed on the site depends a great deal on what theme you are using. It would help if you share the link of your website, and the name of the theme you are using.

    Thread Starter Brawl

    (@brawl345)

    No user ever had a problem with the hierarchy and it’s easy and understandable (besides one can click one-by-one through the sites). That was also not the point of my post.
    My website is https://wiidatabase.de/ and I’m using the default TwentyThirteen theme with a few customizations.

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