WordPress.org Navigation

Topics

The goal of this page is to provide documentation of the current approach to organizing the WordPress.org navigation. This approach is based on the Make Meta conversation in late 2022 and pages available at the time of publication.

Establishing and documenting guidelines for the navigation encourages a consistent approach to changes and additions, and empowers contributors to communicate based on structure rather than individual opinions on particular items.

This solution can be implemented without the creation of additional pages.

  • Menu items are grouped by visitor intent. Example: “I’m here to build out my site” or “I’m here to participate in the project”.
  • To keep things slim, visitors are directed to top-level pages or areas where they can dig deeper (Ie. we avoid deep-linking visitors to everything). Example: Link to Learn rather than Tutorials and/or Lesson Plans.
    • There is a footer menu to help surface some key pages that perhaps don’t fit in the main nav.
  • Top-level parent items are organized based on the frequency of return visits. Example: About might be most used by new visitors, but News will be used repeatedly by visitors every day.
    • Child items are generally sorted by broadest appeal (Ie. most visits – Google Analytics used as data source) to least.
  • Top-level parent items link to existing logical pages and also describe child items.
    • In the future, these could be replaced by proper resource hubs.
  • Top-level parent items are duplicated as the first-child items to avoid confusion around whether or not the parent item itself is clickable.
  • Link names should be accessible and recognizable to everyone. Example: “Contribute” may be readily recognizable to existing community members, but alternatives like “Community” are more easily understood by everyone, including new visitors.

Additional notes and exceptions

  • News is the primary content hub, frequently visited/re-visited, so it has been promoted to the top-level navigation. This is a powerful signal to visitors and search engines. That said, if space is limited, it could just as easily live under “About”.
  • Forums are technically a sub-section of Documentation, but they are not highlighted on the current hub page. Especially in the case of learning and support, the barrier to entry should be low. The forums are also some of the highest trafficked pages, so reducing clicks to get there makes sense. For these reasons, Forums are a dedicated item under Learn.

Top ↑

  • https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/251
  • https://github.com/WordPress/wporg-mu-plugins/issues/342

Last updated: