Now that you’re using WordPress to power your business website and blog and are spending a lot of time in the Dashboard area you are likely getting frustrated with scrolling up and down to get to the WordPress Dashboard menu items.
Dashboard Scrolling Overload
That’s what happened to us and in this article, we’ll show you a plugin we use to bypass our frustration with the Dashboard navigation in WordPress. We spend an average of 8-10 hours a day in the backend of WordPress either writing articles and tutorials, or enhancing our client sites in one way or another.
The default navigation is vertically positioned on the left side of your screen. Each menu item grouping has an accordion like feature that allows you to expand and contract to reveal nested menu items, but this doesn’t work very well for us.
We never know what menu we’ll need to get into next, so we leave everything expanded to avoid the extra click of the mouse to expand a menu. This causes another issue. It forces us to scroll up and down constantly to find the menu we need.
Luckily, there is a solution that works perfectly, and this is why we love WordPress and the community surrounding it.
The Plugin Solution – Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
Here’s the description from the plugin’s download page on the WordPress plugin repository…
The lazy and the productive will love it : all admin links available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages. And plenty more space on your screen.
In other words, this plugin totally changes the default left-sided vertical navigation and moves everything up to the top of your screen in a horizontal menu, complete with dropdown menu items.
This plugin has over half a million downloads!
I’m a bit surprised that horizontal dropdown menus haven’t been rolled into the core software, but then again, that would go against the main philosophy of WordPress a bit. The dev team are more interested in allowing other developers to create awesome tools like this plugin that users can decide to add, rather than risk bloating the core software itself.
Let’s See it In Action Shall We?
In the video below, I’ll walk you through the installation and activation of this plugin. It won’t take long to see how this plugin completely changes your Dashboard of WordPress and makes backend navigation infinitely more streamlined and productive for users.
What Do You Think of This Plugin? Does It Make WordPress Easier for You?
Please do us a favor and leave a comment with your thoughts on our tutorial or the plugin featured here. We sure would love to hear your opinion, or how it may have made your blogging easier.
