While sticky navigation looks to be just an aesthetic feature or a simple stylistic detail, it can actually greatly aid your site’s performance. Traditionally once you scroll down from the menu or the header, you just move on and don’t normally go back to check out that header once again; that’s where making it sticky comes in.
Having a fixed navigation menu means that there’s a higher chance your potential users will engage more with everything that’s on the website, which will, in turn, lead to more conversions as they can finalize their transactions faster and with more efficiency. Isn’t that ultimately what everybody wants from their online transactions, a quick and easy process? And what’s best, creating a sticky header/menu in WordPress is quick and easy.
WP Sticky
WP Sticky is a fantastic and popular plugin for WordPress that can help you make any element sticky. The plugin works fine with pretty much everything from page builders to themes and plugins.
It’s fast and easy to use, and no prior coding experience is necessary as all you have to do to turn an element sticky is just pick it off the screen and choose your settings.
Once you’ve chosen your future sticky elements, you can customize how and where they show up. For instance, having a large sticky header can really prove a problem for mobile users, so with WP Sticky, you can choose that it doesn’t appear on mobile devices and have it only appear on large or extra-large screens. You can have your sticky element fade-in or slide down depending on your preference, as well as exclude certain places where you don’t want the chosen element to show up as sticky.
FEES: WP Sticky is currently on sale with discounted prices on all three of the plans they offer. The Single version now costs 39$ and comes with a license for one site, the Team costs 59$ and comes with licenses for 3 sites, and the Agency comes with 100 site licenses and the option to install it on client sites, all for a price of 99$.
Awesome Header
One of the Awesome Header‘s greatest upsides is that it does more than just help you turn your header elements sticky. As a matter of fact, by using this plugin, you can replace your entire WordPress Header. It’s highly customizable, has an abundance of color choices, and allows the user to have up to three navigation layers. It’s also very touch-screen friendly, and with the number of tablets going around these days, this feature is becoming increasingly more sought after.
Along with its purely aesthetic features, Awesome Header also supports WooCommerce and BBPress for breadcrumbs. So, if you’re a developer and are in the market for a plugin that offers even more control over your header’s appearance, this plugin might be just the thing for you.
FEES: If you decide to get this plugin, your options are either a standard or an extended license. The Standard license is going to cost you 17$ and the Extended 90$. There is also a 4.50$ fee if you want to extend customer support to 12 months.
Mega Main Menu
Mega Main Menu is definitely one of the top plugins on the market for its purpose. In particular, this plugin has amazing capabilities such as adding sticky menus, having a logo, and a search option in one menu, and really good dropdowns. Like Awesome Header, it has unlimited color options and allows you to change an element’s color on the menu. You can use either regular color, gradients, and background images if you so choose. It also comes with over 600 Google fonts and over 1600 vector icons that are sure to draw more attention and help you achieve your vision of a perfect menu. There are over 10 dropdown combinations, and the entire thing is WPML compatible.
FEES: Once again, you can buy this plugin at CodeCanyon and get either a Regular license for 16$ or an extended one for 130$. The fee to extend support to 12 months on the former is 4.13$ and 39.38$ for the latter.
QuadMenu
This particular plugin has a drag and drop dashboard, which is going to enable the user to make any amount of mega menus without any prior knowledge of code. QuadMenu was developed with a clear idea of a mobile user experience. It will function perfectly on any screen size, bearing the same idea in mind the interfaces are also touchscreen friendly to make the mobile experience complete. There are unlimited menu themes and support for child themes as well. You can add sticky menus on a scroll and align any of your possible link options. Another thing worth mentioning about this plugin is its ability to customize more things than customary. By using QuadMenu, you can create things like custom logos or even fonts.
FEES: If you decide that QuadMenu is the right choice for you, price-wise, you’ll be looking at 20$ for a Regular license and 85$ for an extended one. The extended support fee for a Regular is 5.63$ and 22.50$ for the Extended.
Site Content Navigator
This plugin might be a great choice for you if you create either a lot of content in short periods of time or just make posts on the long side. Site Content Navigator will give you the option to have sticky navigation on any of your posts. The greatest thing about it is probably the fact that it comes with a customizable progress bar that indicates current reading progress.
At the very beginning, you choose a post type. After that, there’s a lot that you can do with it, change the font to anything you want, turn on/off the tooltips for any specific section, choose whether you want your sticky menu to hover, or turn it off completely. An elegant thing about this plugin is that it comes with a sidebar widget that you can use to inform your users what sections on the page are available and where they are.
FEES: A Regular license for this plugin is going to cost you 17$, and if you want to extend the support to 12 months, that’s going to be an additional 4.50$. The Extended license does have a bit of a heftier price tag coming around to 225$ with a 75$ fee for support extension.
Hero Menu
A great thing about Hero Menu is that it features a fully customizable menu layout. It’s straightforward to use as it’s equipped with a drag-and-drop interface that can help you build a unique custom menu design. The tool also comes with a preset of 60 color combos designed by professionals to be sure that the visual aspect is something you won’t be lacking in. It’s also fully responsive, and you’ll never have any issues with running it on a mobile device. There’s a bunch of free icons to add to your menu to give even more visual interest. You can activate the sticky menu with a single click, and from there, you can change the color, transparency, and logo placement.
FEES: For Hero Menu, in particular, you can only get a Regular license, which costs 20 $. The support extension to 12 months adds another 5.63$ to the price tag if you feel that you need it.
Sticky Header on Scroll
Sticky Header is a rather simple plugin, but it gets the job you need doing done. It is fully responsive and will scale very gracefully onto any screen size. Once you choose your sticky element, you can easily customize it by changing colors or labels, adding a logo, playing around with the opacity, and more.
Even though it’s going to function properly on a mobile device, the tool still provides the user with an option to disable mobile devices’ stickiness if that’s what’s right for your site. There’s also a button for a custom dropdown menu that you can also hide if you so desire. The plugin itself is lightweight, straight to the point, and easy to use, definitely a possible solution for adding a sticky feature to your site’s header.
FEES: The regular license for Sticky Header will cost you 22$ and the support extension another 6.38$. However, if you need an extended license, you’re looking at 104$ with an additional 29.63$ for 12 months of support.
Final Thoughts
The number of sites using sticky navigation is growing by the day. However, if done poorly, it can distract your users and produce the opposite effect. Sometimes the sticky header is just too big for some screen, or it’s just not coordinated with the rest of the site and is therefore distracting. This is why it’s important to choose the right tools, to get the effect you desire out of utilizing them, and not to get yourself in a sticky situation.