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WP Mobile Menu Review: Create a Better WordPress Mobile Menu

Last Updated on August 31st, 2023

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Mobile traffic accounts for around half of all the website traffic on the Internet (maybe more for your niche), which is why pretty much every WordPress theme advertises itself as responsive nowadays.

But here’s the thing – “responsive” just means that your website will adapt to different devices, it doesn’t automatically mean that your mobile visitors will have a great experience, which is what you actually need to care about.

WP Mobile Menu is a freemium plugin that helps you guarantee a better mobile experience by helping you add a more user-friendly and functional navigation menu to the mobile version of your WordPress site – no matter which theme you’re using.

In our WP Mobile Menu review, we’ll show you exactly what it can do for you, as well as how it works on a live WordPress site.

WP Mobile Menu Review: The Feature List

Ok, as you learned above, the core benefit of WP Mobile Menu is that it helps you add a more user-friendly and functional mobile menu to any WordPress theme.

But how does it actually do that? Let’s run through the features…

First off, it’s actually not just limited to mobile visitors. You can set your own custom breakpoints to trigger the mobile menu, which lets you use the same menu for desktop visitors as well, if you want.

Beyond that, you can create both header and footer menus. And you can also create multiple menus, with options for both right and left menus.

You can choose from a few different menu types, including:

  • Overlay
  • Slideout push content
  • Slideout over content
  • Slideout from top

To actually add content to your menus, you can use the regular WordPress menu functionality, which lets you use the same familiar interface and keep things consistent (or, you can also use a different set of menu links for your mobile menu, of course).

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Beyond letting you include regular menu links, WP Mobile Menu also adds some dedicated functionality for:

  • Ajax live search – users can enter their query and instantly see the search results – no page reload required. The mobile UX is also great.
  • User Profile – include a user’s profile and avatar as part of your menu. This is a really great option for any type of membership site or community.
  • Logo – easily add your logo as part of a menu.
  • WooCommerce – a dedicated WooCommerce integration helps you include users’ shopping carts, as well as shopping filters. You can also add a sticky cart with the footer menu.

Beyond that core functionality, you also just generally get tons of customization options. You’ll have full control over:

  • Colors
  • Fonts
  • Icons
  • Functionality
  • …a lot more

What Can You Use WP Mobile Menu For?

First off, WP Mobile Menu can help any WordPress site. The basic functionality – creating a better mobile menu – is valuable for any type of WordPress site in this increasingly mobile-first world. So it’s not like the use cases below are the only situations where you can benefit.

However, I think there are a few sites where WP Mobile Menu is extra good, and I’ll tell you why:

  • WooCommerce stores – WP Mobile Menu’s WooCommerce integration helps you create a much more user-friendly shopping experience by making it easier for shoppers to access their carts and product filters.
  • Membership sites/online courses – because you can create menus that are restricted to logged-in users, you can create dedicated menus to help your logged-in members navigate. Additionally, the User Profile feature lets you add their avatar/profile to the menu (you’ll see this in action).
  • Social networks/forums – the exact same idea as membership sites!

Hands-on With WP Mobile Menu

Now that you know what this plugin can do, let’s go hands-on and I’ll show you how it works.

To test it, I just picked a random popular theme from WordPress.org – ColorMag. Here’s what the default mobile menu looks like – it’s a simple hamburger icon that expands a drop-down menu list:

Default menu

Now, I’ll install WP Mobile Menu, use it to create a custom menu experience, and show you how everything works.

WP Mobile Menu Starts Working Right Away

As soon as I activated WP Mobile Menu and assigned a menu to the WP Mobile Menu position, I already had a brand new menu experience for mobile visitors, which I think is an improvement over ColorMag’s default responsive menu.

You get a hamburger menu on the left, and a search icon on the right. The menu is also much more compact, which lets visitors see more of your content right away:

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New menu

The hamburger menu opens a full-height slide-out like this:

WP Mobile Menu review example

And the search icon opens up an awesome Ajax live search experience that automatically suggests content as visitors enter queries in the search box:

WP Mobile Menu ajax search

Again – those images above are the defaults. Now, let’s look at the many options you get for customizing how your mobile menus work…

General Options Tab

The General Options tab does what it says – it lets you configure general settings for how your mobile menus work.

At the top, you can set your custom breakpoints and choose which menus to use. Again, you get three different menu options:

  • Left menu (header)
  • Right menu (header)
  • Footer menu

General options

You can also configure basic settings for what type of menu to use. For example, the default overlay vs one of the slideout types. And you’ll also get some settings for controlling how submenus work:

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Menu types

Header Tab

The Header tab lets you configure the basic settings for your mobile header – not the individual menus.

First, you get a convenient option to use drag-and-drop to arrange your header elements. You can also hide elements that you don’t want to use and choose whether to use:

  • Sticky header
  • Transparent header (naked)

You generally get tons of options here, with a bevy of settings to control your header’s:

  • Logo
  • Alignment
  • Icons
  • Search
  • Etc.

Footer Tab

If you enabled the footer menu, the Footer tab lets you configure how it works, including whether to automatically hide the footer menu when a user scrolls up:

Here’s an example of what the footer menu might look like:

Left Menu and Right Menu Tabs

The Left Menu and Right Menu tabs hold identical sets of options, just for their respective position.

At the top, you can use drag-and-drop and visibility controls to control what content appears:

  • Left Menu – this is the content from an actual WordPress menu (Appearance → Menus).
  • User Profile – this is a neat dedicated feature that displays a user’s profile.
  • Logo – you can include your site’s logo.
  • Search – you can also add search to a menu.

For example, if you added the User Profile above the Left Menu, here’s what your menu might look like. See how you get that nice user profile effect? This is great for membership sites or stores:

User profile feature

You also get the option to only show a menu for logged-in users, which is another great feature for membership sites or eCommerce stores. For example, you could create a dedicated menu for all your membership site content that only registered members can see.

Beyond those big settings, you also get lots of options to control:

  • Icons
  • The background image/color for your menu
  • Sizing/spacing

And again, the options are identical for the Right Menu position.

WooCommerce Tab

If you’re running a WooCommerce store, the WooCommerce tab gives you some really nice options for creating menus dedicated to WooCommerce. Because almost half of eCommerce happens on mobile devices, this is a really great way to improve the mobile shopping experience at your store.

First off, you can add an expandable shopping cart icon. When clicked, it opens an overlay of the user’s cart (no page reload required). Beyond that, you can also add the cart total to the footer, which is another nice feature:

WooCommerce cart integration

You can also add product filters that will only appear on your shop and archive pages. And you get nice features like the ability to automatically open the shopping cart panel after a shopper adds a product to their cart and restrict the header search to just WooCommerce products:

Colors and Fonts Tabs

Finally, as the names suggest, the Colors and Fonts tabs give you full control over the colors and fonts for all your various menu options.

The settings here are quite detailed – I really do mean “all”:

WP Mobile Menu Pricing: How Much Will It Cost?

WP Mobile Menu has a basic free version available at WordPress.org.

After that, there are two main plans, depending on whether or not you need the WooCommerce functionality:

  • Professional – $4.99 per month – all the premium features excluding WooCommerce.
  • Business – $7.99 per month – all the Professional features plus WooCommerce support.

There’s also a $29.99 per month Enterprise plan that gets you a private Slack channel and a personal success manager.

Additionally, all of the plans offer a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Final Thoughts on WP Mobile Menu

WP Mobile Menu delivers on its promise of creating a much better mobile menu interface.

The fact that it works with any theme means you’ll be able to offer an improved mobile experience no matter what your theme is.

And overall, I was just generally impressed by the depth of the functionality that WP Mobile Menu offers.

Through the many customization options, you’ll be able to control exactly how your menu(s) look and function.

Finally, the addition of new functionality for Ajax live search, user profiles, WooCommerce, and more gives you options that most themes just plain don’t offer.

So no matter what theme you’re using, I think you should check out WP Mobile Menu, especially if you get a high percentage of mobile visitors (you can use Google Analytics to check this):

Get WP Mobile Menu

A team of WordPress experts that love to test out new WordPress related software, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.