Do you want to Add/Create a Transparent Header Menu on your WordPress website?
Everyone wishes to have a beautiful and responsive website that helps them grab the attention of the visitors. Building a website, you need to make and try various changes to find the perfect fit that outstands your website.
A website with an astounding display on all the web browsers and devices comforts your user to view the site whatever be the place (any web browsers/any device). A theme can’t be promising to get all the necessary features on your site. That’s when the plugin comes in handy. It makes sure to add the missing functionalities on your website and help function better.
Responsive Menu plugin is a WordPress plugin designed to make your site appear visually appealing and responsive on all devices and browsers. As the name implies, the plugin ensures to improve the responsiveness of the site right after the installation. Along with that, it offers many other features and functionalities for the better performance of the site. It allows you to create a Transparent Header Menu, Transparent Menu bar, and Navigation menu.
Why Create a Transparent Header Menu?
Transparent headers have become very popular in web page design. There are millions of sites using a transparent header in their website. The reason behind it is that a transparent header enables the page content area to get merged up with the header so that the background, image or video of the content becomes visible.
Usually, a website has a header with some different colours and blocks the background. With the transparent header, the background whether it’s a video or an image is visible along with the title in the menu. The site appears clean and beautiful as it is all transparent to view through the menu. It is a modern style, so, chances are your site is considered to have a modern design.
How to Create a Transparent Header Menu?
Many themes provide the option of adding a transparent menu whereas some don’t. Also, the option of adding it through the use of a theme doesn’t sound convenient to many users. There are various easy ways to create a transparent header menu on your WordPress website. It can be through the use of themes, plugins, coding, and much more.
I would recommend you use a plugin. The plugin has a feature defined for a certain purpose and provides the best function. Any features added on a site through a default functionality and plugin always differ. The use of plugins makes it more defined and perfect in performance. In this tutorial, we will create a Transparent Header Menu using the Responsive Menu plugin.
As a first step, Install and activate the plugin on your website. Follow our tutorial guide on ‘How to Install a WordPress Plugin on the website?’
- Activate the plugin.
Now, if your website has a default menu that is well and good, however, if your WordPress website is missing the main navigation menu then first you’d need to create one. The process of creating a menu in WordPress is quite simple.
- Select Appearance>>Menu
On the page, you can see that you have the list of menus that you have created on your website. But, the menus are not allocated to any location.
For a primary menu,
- Click on Manage Locations
- Select the menu to the primary location.
- Click on Save Changes.
Now, the selected menu will appear in the primary location.
Creating a Transparent Menu using the Responsive Menu Plugin
Here, to create a transparent menu,
- Click on Responsive Menu>>Menus
You’ll see that there is no menu on the page.
- Click on the Create New Menu button.
Here, you will be asked to select the theme (template of your choice). There are also preview options available where you can view the demo in detail.
- Select the one that suits the needs of your website.
- Click on Next.
Note: [You can change the template later if you don’t find it convenient]
- Provide the name of the menu.
- You can link the menu to the existing menus so that you don’t have to add all the pages individually. Select the WordPress menu you would like to link it with.
- Hide the default theme menu, here you need to hide the original theme menu to replace it with a responsive menu. You will learn more about this later in the article.
- Display visibility, select the devices on which you want to display the new Responsive menu (i.e. Mobile, Tablet, Desktop)
- Choose the display condition i.e. the pages on which you want your menu to be displayed.
After selecting all the options, click on Next.
Now, to hide the main menu and replace it with the one you have just created, select the settings option on the page you will be directed to.
- Select the General Settings
At the bottom of the page, you will see the Hide Theme Menu options.
In order to hide the original menu,
- Click the menu on the screen and left-click to inspect.
You need to copy and paste the CSS selector to the Hide Theme menu option to hide it from the site. To learn more about this visit this document that explains how to hide the original theme menu.
- Click on Update.
Upon the update, you’ll view that the main menu on the homepage menu is replaced with the new one you created.
In the previous steps, you had linked the menu to the main menu of the WordPress theme menu so now when you click on the new menu it has all the pages you previously had.
As the next step, you need to enable the menu as a header bar to make it a transparent header menu.
For this,
- Select the Header Bar.
- Enable the Header Bar.
Upon enabling it you can see various options appear on the page.
Now to disable/reduce the transparency of the menu,
- Select Appearance>>Background Colour
- Change the opacity and transparency to zero.
- Update the Changes
Now, when you view the site on any device (phone, tablet or computer), the header menu will be transparent.
This is how you can easily create a transparent header menu in your WordPress website using the Responsive Menu plugin.
Wrapping Up
One can try various changes in a website to get the perfect look. A site with the same layouts can be boring for viewers to view. Hence, changing the layouts and appearance gives new look to your website. Creating a Transparent Header can be one of the changes. To note that, the functioning of the menu creates no difference and provides the same responsiveness as before.
This is the end of the tutorial on ‘How to create a Transparent Header Menu using Responsive Menu?’ The plugin as explained before is a multipurpose plugin that helps you to improve the responsiveness of your website and provide perfect menus that appear visually appealing on any website.