Edit any site’s navigation menus without opening wp-admin
Change the WordPress navigation on every site you manage from one dashboard. Drag to reorder and nest, add pages, posts and links, edit labels, and choose which menu the theme shows, all without a login, a password manager or a second tab.
Available now. Included in every plan.
Everything else moved to one dashboard. Menus did not.
Updates, uptime, backups, security, SEO, form submissions and code added to the header or footer are all handled centrally now. Menus were the exception. Changing one meant logging into that specific site, finding the menu screen, and doing it there.
It is a small job that carries a real cost, because of how often it happens and how many sites it happens on. Menus change constantly: a new service page, a seasonal promotion, a page being reworked along with its slug and its search listing, a reshuffle after a rebrand.
If you have ever kept twelve wp-admin tabs open to do one job twelve times, this is the tab that closes them. We wrote up what actually goes wrong with menus across thirty sites and what we changed.
Who reaches for this
- Freelancers and agencies looking after more than a handful of sites
- Marketing teams who want to change navigation without a developer
- In-house teams running several brand or regional sites
- Anyone who owns one site and would rather not log in to move a link
Four things wp-admin does not do
WordPress can already edit a menu. These are the differences that matter when you do it often, on sites that are not yours.
It works across every site from one place
The point is not that you can edit a menu. The point is that you do it from the same dashboard you already have open for everything else, on any of your sites, without a login, a password manager or a second tab. On one site that saves a minute. On thirty it is the difference between doing the job and putting it off until somebody complains.
It will not overwrite somebody else’s edit
WordPress saves a menu as a whole, so if somebody edits it while your screen is open, wp-admin throws their work away when you save and says nothing. WPCentrify checks instead: if the menu changed after you opened it, the save is refused and you are told. It guards against overwriting rather than merging, so you reload and reapply.
Rows tell you when an entry is broken
If a menu item points at a page that has been drafted, binned or deleted, the row says so before you publish anything, because it is checked against the record of every page and post on that site. Visitors clicking that entry get a 404, and normally nobody finds out until a client does.
Nothing is saved until you save it
Every drag, rename, addition and removal stays local until you press Save. The toolbar counts what is unsaved, and Discard puts everything back exactly as it was. No half-applied reorder, and no surprise on a live site.
Every action has a button, not just a drag
Move up, move down, indent and outdent are buttons as well as drags. This is not a fallback bolted on afterwards. Drag does not work on a touch screen and is invisible to a screen reader, so for those people the buttons are the real interaction, and they are built to the same standard.
A move that is not possible is shown disabled rather than hidden, so rows do not jump around while you work.
If you look after public sector or healthcare sites, this is the part you get asked about.
Both ways to move a row
- Drag by the handle, or move up and down with a button
- Drag right to nest, or indent and outdent with a button
- A parent carries its children with it either way
- Impossible moves are disabled, never hidden
- The drop indicator says where the row lands, in words
What you can do from the menu editor
| Capability | What it does |
|---|---|
| Reorder and nest | Drag a row by its handle. Drag it right to nest it under the row above. A parent carries its children with it. |
| Add pages | Pages, posts and any custom post type the site has, picked from a searchable list. |
| Add links | A path, a full https address, a mailto or a tel link. |
| Edit an item | The label shown in the menu, the title attribute, CSS classes, and open in a new tab. |
| Remove an item | Its children come up a level rather than disappearing with it. |
| Create and delete menus | Deleting asks you to type the word first. |
| Set theme locations | Choose which menu the theme shows as its header, footer or anywhere else it registers. |
What it does not do yet
You would find these out in the first five minutes. Better that you read them here.
- Category and tag items, and post type archives, can be reordered but not addedIf a menu already contains them they are read, moved, saved and left alone. You just cannot create a new one from here yet.
- Menu item descriptions are editable but not shown on the rowYou can edit them in the expanded panel. They are not on the row itself, because almost no theme renders them.
- Up to 200 items per menu, and 5 levels of nestingWordPress technically allows 11 levels. Almost no theme renders past 3, so 5 is headroom rather than a ceiling you will meet.
- Only published pages are offered when addingPutting a draft in the navigation creates a 404 for every visitor, which is the thing this product cleans up elsewhere.
Who can change a menu, and what gets recorded
Viewing a menu and changing one are two separate permissions, so somebody can be given the first without the second.
Every change is recorded in the activity log with who made it and when, whether it was made from WPCentrify or in WordPress itself.
Menu item links are checked on the site before they are saved, so a menu entry cannot be turned into a script. Setting a theme location changes what every visitor sees immediately, so it sits behind a confirmation that says exactly that.
Requirements
- The WPCentrify plugin on the site, version 2.8.0 or newer
- Included in every plan, with no add-on to buy
- A site on an older version sees the tab with a message telling you to update, rather than the tab quietly not being there
Questions about WordPress menu management
Stop opening wp-admin to move a link
Edit the navigation on every WordPress site you manage from one dashboard, with the checks that stop a menu change becoming a broken link or somebody else’s lost afternoon.
Free during early access. No credit card required.