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A clean, simple, and consistent navigation can take the user experience of your WordPress site to the next level. It is a crucial part of a website that allows web visitors to navigate through your pages, without any distraction. This not only improves the usability and accessibility of a website but also helps you generate quality leads for your business.
We all know that keeping your website 99.9% secure and achieving loading times under 1 second is important, but having natural and easy-to-use navigation that delights visitors could make a huge difference in how people think about you.
But using a standard navigation won’t help you get the best possible results. For that, you need to implement sticky headers and fixed menus to make your navigation more visible and accessible. When a menu is “sticky,” it just means that the fixed bar is visible as you scroll up and down the page, making it accessible no matter where on a page you are.
We have a sticky banner menu implemented on this site as well! See how the menu is visible as you scroll down the page reading this article.
In a scroll-influenced world, sticky navigation plays an immense role in giving rich experiences to website visitors. Many people are creating sticky navigation either on the top or bottom of their sites. You can achieve this by integrating a robust plugin or some jQuery code (which is a bit more technical).
Here, we will share with you some of the best plugins and jQuery solutions that will help you create user-friendly sticky navigation for your WordPress site. But before this, we will delve into the strengths and weaknesses of sticky navigation.
Why Implement A Sticky Menu?
1. Quicker and Easier to Navigate
Sticky menus allow visitors to navigate through your web pages quickly and easily. They can instantly hover their mouse on the menu and click on the link they want to visit on your site. This encourages the visitor to stay longer, which, automatically improves user engagement and conversions on your WordPress site.
2. Helps in Reducing the Bounce Rate
A simple, clean, and easy-to-navigate menu can automatically reduce the bounce rate of a site. With the help of sticky navigation, you can boost the page views, as visitors can jump into different pages of your site quickly and easily.
3. Improves Brand Awareness
Use the sticky navigation to display your logo or any other visual content in the header that can boost the brand awareness of your business.
But There Are Disadvantages
1. Restriction With Some Designs
You will face some design limitations when going with the sticky navigation. It means you won’t get too many design options while creating sticky menus for your WordPress site. For example, the most common place for horizontal fixed or sticky navigation is on the top of a site, so you won’t make changes to any design pattern.
2. It Can Be Distracting
Make sure you carefully design your sticky navigation, otherwise, it can distract your potential web visitors. There are some sticky elements that bounce back late to their original position when the user scrolls down the page. So, ensure that your navigation is simple, and accessible and should not compete with the main content of your site.
Plugins To Help You With A Sticky Menu
If you are not comfortable with coding or you are new to the web development industry, you can make use of the best WordPress plugin that will make it easy for you to create sticky menu bars. Here are the five WordPress plugins that will help you avoid these pitfalls and improve the user experience of your site when a visitor navigates through your web pages.
1. myStickymenu
It is a simple, modern, and responsive WordPress plugin that empowers you to build sticky menus on the top of your web page in a matter of a few minutes. myStickymenu was formerly developed for Twenty Thirteen Themes, but it can also work amazingly well on other modern templates.
The out-of-the-box features allow site owners to create fixed or sticky navigation using this plugin. It supports multi-language functionality and can work beautifully on different devices and screen sizes.
In fact, the plugin makes it super-easy for you to add custom CSS code if you want to customize the look and feel of your navigation.
2. Sticky Menu (or Anything!) on Scroll
This is an ideal plugin for creating sticky navigation for your WordPress site. Although it is commonly used for navigation menus, you can also use it to stick any element at the top of your web page once they scroll down. You can use Sticky Menu on Scroll to create a sticky sidebar, banner ad, call-to-action box, and so on.
You can even tweak the appearance of your elements if you know the basics of HTML/CSS coding. All you need to do is to know the trick of choosing the right selection for the element you want to make sticky. Sometimes, you need to be more specific while picking a selector for your element(s).
There is also an option for positioning from the top that lets you add some space between the sticky element and at the top of the page to make it more flexible when you scroll down the page. Even you can add a Z-index if any other element is overshadowing your sticky element.
3. WPFront Notification Bar
WPFront Notification Bar is much more a notification plugin than a navigation. The features and options available with this plugin allow you to create a sticky bar either on the top or at the bottom of your site to display a notification.
It comes with a ton of customization options that let you tweak the height, color, look, and feel of an element in minutes. You can also choose whether you want to display your element on a scroll or stick to the top or bottom of the page. You have full control over the appearance and positioning of your notification bar.
4. Hero Menu – Responsive WordPress Mega Menu Plugin
This is the only premium WordPress plugin in our collection. It is a one-stop solution for creating all types of menus, be it a stunning mega menu or a simple drop-down one.
Hero Menu makes it convenient for people to design beautiful sticky or fixed navigation for your WordPress site, all thanks to its advanced features and functions. The high point is that it is fully compatible with WooCommerce so that you can create a navigation menu for your eCommerce site with ease.
When it comes to creating sticky navigation, you only need to enable the fixed navigation in your plugin settings and customize the overall look and feel to make it more compelling and user-friendly.
5. WordPress Notification Bar
WordPress Notification Bar is a simple and intuitive WordPress plugin that lets you build a sticky notification bar and call to action for your WordPress site.
The plugin comes packaged with a host of exciting features and customization options that let you create a striking call to action button and sticky notification bar in a matter of minutes.
You can use its customization options to tweak the color, height, and positioning of your sticky elements on the fly. Even, it supports multisite functionality and works great across different devices.
Creating sticky Navigation for WordPress using jQuery
Since all modern websites use the sticky position feature in their navigation menu, we bring you an incredible method of creating sticky navigation using jQuery for our technical readers. However, there are many jQuery plugins out there on the web market, you can do it using a few lines of jQuery codes.
The following jQuery procedure will help you create sticky navigation for your WordPress site quickly and easily. Under this method, we will use jQuery to manipulate the DOM and embed a class to create sticky navigation at the of a web page. You can easily create sticky navigation using some of the HTML5 elements in the markup.
The Markup:
For markup, you will need to build a header that will contain unit content with a class of demo-nav, which is later followed by main navigation with a class of main-nav that includes a series of links for the main navigation menu. Thereafter, you will set up your content and cover them in class content. Here, you can use the Lorem ipsum site as a dummy text. Consider the following coding:
<header>
<h1>Creating <span>Sticky</span> Navigation</h1>
<nav class="demo-nav">
<a href="index.html" class="active">Using jQuery</a>
<a href="index2.html">Using CSS</a>
</nav>
</header>
<nav class="main-nav">
<div class="container">
<a href="#">Home</a>
<a href="#">About</a>
<a href="#">Profile</a>
<a href="#">Contact</a>
</div>
</nav>
<div class="content">
<h2>Main Content Here!</h2>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
</div>
Tip: The above jQuery coding includes some of the HTML5 tags and classes that will help you create a sticky navigation menu for your WordPress site.
Wrapping It Up
Sticky menus are a great way to improve the UX of a WordPress site. It not only makes navigation faster but also encourages people to stay connected to your site, which boosts conversions and revenues. With the help of these plugins or code, you can create stunning sticky navigation and notification bar for your WordPress site in a matter of a few minutes.
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