ISSUE: Grid menu has too many items and is wrapping

This usually results from having a large number of sub-categories in the category you’ve assigned to feature a Grid.

Let’s walk through an example of how to address this.

A good example might be a Travel category. Suppose you had 20 sub-categories, all named after locations/destinations (think: New York, London, Paris, San Francisco, etc., etc.). That means that if you assign the  Travel category to return the Grid archival layout, every single one of those destinations will be at the top of the page. 

Easy for readers in theory, but in practice, it actually creates more content for users to have to sort through, and it will likely cause the menu to wrap and look awkward with so many items.

The better route here is to do some category re-organization!

To start,  think about how users are actually accessing your content—in this example, your travel content. Travel is a unique vertical because people tend to be looking for something specific, whether that’s a series of your posts from an exact destination or region, or specific tips, like what you wore in a particular place. You can get even more specific and think about how and where people travel. For example, you could likely group destinations by categories such as “Warm Weather Getaways,” “Snowy Escapes,” “Sight Seeing Trips,” or “Easy Staycations.” Creating sub-categories such as these, and then further sub-categorizing the previous locations/destinations into these categories will create a more cohesive, easy-to-use Grid experience.

That’s because Grid menus can continue drilling down into sub-categories. Take a look at how this works with the short video below:

Notice when the user clicks into travel, this blogger has organized their Travel content based on trip type, focusing on the weather and vacation vibe. But you could use this same technique for geographic locations too (think: Europe, North America, South America, The Caribbean).

This same approach can be applied to other categories, like Outfits. We always recommend using occasion and/or season as great filter starting points, because the reality is, if it’s the dead of winter, most users won’t be looking for summer dress inspiration (unless you happen to have a big readership in the opposite hemisphere from where you live!).

The truth is, no menu should be 20 items long—that’s simply too many options! So instead, think through how to present your content. We find this usually helps clean up menus pretty quickly.

How to set up categories to achieve a drilldown Grid menu

To create new categories for your Grid drilldown menus, head to  Posts > Categories.

You will want to create a sub-category to the major parent category (such as Travel). Here is what this looks like:

Note that the parent category is set to “Travel” here!

Next, you’ll want to create an additional sub-category, which would be nested under “Big City Getaways.” Here’s what that looks like:

Note that on the right side of the screen, you can see that “Big City Getaways” is now a sub-category of Travel. Once we add “New York City” as a sub-category of “Big City Getaways”…

You can see that it is further nested under Travel.

Once all your categories, sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories are created, you can head to the  Posts section of your dashboard and add the appropriate categories to any posts you wish!