When you create your main menu on your WordPress website, you may wish to create a custom link for a better user experience.
Wait, what?
What’s a custom link in WordPress?
Glad you asked.
It’s basically a menu item that appears as one of your main pages but users can’t click it.
But why would you want to do that?
Well, imagine you have created quite a few pages for your company’s website. You’re organizing them as sub-menu items so the hierarchy of your website makes sense to your visitors, right?
Suppose now you have a main menu item called “Services” with sub-menus “Nutrition”, “Fitness” and “Recipes”.
When your website’s visitors click on “Services”, they’ll see the list of sub-menu items appear and guess what?
Their natural behaviour will be to choose one of the options you’ve just presented to them.
What happens now if that “Services” menu item was actually the link to such “Services” page that actually had content in it?
Chances are your visitors will never visit this page as these sub-menu items appeared like a “drop-down menu” so the natural choice was to pick one of the options, not necessarily to click again on “Services” in hopes there’s an actual page behind that link.
While we cannot realistically be 100% certain that all visitors will always follow such behaviour, from our experience we believe in creating custom links to make it easy for your visitors to explore your website using the flow you’ve created for them.
That’s why we suggest to create a custom link when you want to use sub-menu items on your main menu.
How to create a custom link in WordPress
1-Go to Appearance > Menu
2-Select “Custom Link” on the left
3-Enter a random address (it’s required or it won’t work). You can enter just the letter “a” for example such as “http://a”. If you don’t enter anything in that field, the custom link won’t be created.
4-Type the name of that custom link as you want it to appear on your menu and click “Save”
5-Click this custom link and make sure to delete the “http://a” or whatever you’ve written in the URL field so it doesn’t link to anything
6-Move that custom link to your desired location on your menu.
7-You can now drag and drop the real links to the pages you want to appear as sub-menu items to that custom link by moving them right underneath with a slight indent so it becomes a sub-menu of that link (or “child page”).
That’s it! You’ve now created a custom link that can help the user understand what they can expect to find as pages under this item while being not clickable to avoid confusion.
The only option they have now is to select one of the sub-menu items you’ve presented to them.
