When you create a new page in WordPress it automatically shows up in your main navigation menu. Although this is intended default behavior, sometimes you don’t want that to happen. As an example, I regularly create “test” pages for my clients in order to give them a visual interpretation of some functionality or process I’m trying to explain. I absolutely don’t want these test pages in my menu, not only because it would look terrible but also because I don’t want the general public to see these client-specific pages.
Have you ever had the need to create a WordPress page and have it NOT show up in your page navigation menu? At first glance, this seems like a really simple thing to do, and with the menu creation options in WordPress 3.0 it is…well, kind of. I’m going to save the menu creation for another tutorial but I wanted to show you a very quick and easy way to exclude any page you want from your page navigation menus. It’s simple and I use it every day. It’s a plugin named…Exclude Pages from Navigation made available by Simon Wheatley.
This plugin does just what it says in the description…
This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).
Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.)
Let’s have a look. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and install, then activate this plugin. After activation you might expect to see some new options on the left side of your Dashboard, but this plugin is a bit different. This plugin’s settings are where they should be, only on the Pages screen while in Edit Mode. Go ahead and either click Add New under the pages menu or go to any page and go to Edit Mode. Now have a look at the right side of the page. Somewhere there you’ll see a new item named Exclude Pages. It looks like this:
If you want to hide or exclude this page from your navigation page menus, simply uncheck this box and either save or update your page. That’s it!
Here’s my page navigation before using the plugin. The page I want to hide is named Page that Should be Hidden:
After I’ve unchecked the Include this page in lists of pages option, my page navigation menu now looks like this:
[box color=yellow]Important Note: Although this technique prevents pages from being seen on your site, they can still be indexed by search engines and therefore seen by unintended people through search results. To learn how to prevent search engines from crawling these pages, please see the next post.[/box]
Care to watch a quick video?
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