How to Change Which Menu to Use in Your WordPress Theme

Getting your theme set up in WordPress involves a number of different steps, but one of them is almost always creating a navigational menu. This menu can include things like links to your site’s most popular pages, links to your different post categories, or anything else on your site that you think is important for your visitors.

But you may have created your menu, only to view it on your site and see that your theme is still using one of its default settings instead. Fortunately your previous hard work with your menu creation wasn’t in vain; you simply need to adjust which menu the theme is using for a particular location.

How to Switch Menus in WordPress Menu Locations

The steps in this article were performed in WordPress 5.2.1, using the Smart Passive Income Pro theme and the Genesis framework. Note that most themes have different names for their menu locations, so your theme may not provide the exact same options as mine. However, most well-designed themes will include a description of the menu location that should be fairly obvious.

Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your site at (yourdomain.com)/wp-admin.

Step 2: Hover over Appearance at the left side of the window, then choose the Menus option.

Step 3: Select the Manage Locations tab at the top of the window.

Step 4: Click the dropdown menu to the right of the desired location, then select the correct menu for that location. When finished, click the Save Changes button.

Is one of the links in your menu not particularly useful or correct? Find out how to change a menu link’s anchor text so that it is more helpful for your site’s navigation.