20+ Creative Mega Menu Examples To Inspire You Today

mega menu examples

Today, mega menus have become an essential element in content-heavy websites. Creating a mega menu will greatly contribute to improving the navigation for the stores selling a large number of products and websites accommodating a lot of content. That’s the reason why they are present on many well-known websites, from retail brands such as eBay, Best Buy, and Walmart to popular businesses like Evernote and Asana.

To know exactly what a mega menu is and how it benefits websites, please read our article. Furthermore, we want to show the top 20+ creative mega menu examples that may inspire you. Let’s explore them now!

Table of Contents

“Mega” means very large and impressive. As the name suggests, mega menus are expandable menus that let visitors see a full list of categories and subcategories on the website. Because mega menus display the entire navigation of a website in a single interface, users can reach any of their desired pages with fewer clicks.

Different from other dropdown menus, mega menus come with no scrolling. Instead, they show all these options at once. At a glance, it looks like a sitemap and works as an outline of all the important pages/links on your site. Depending on your site structure, you can choose to display the mega menu horizontally or vertically.

To make the mega menu more appealing, people often add images, icons, short descriptions, and many other ideas to their designs as seen in many of the theme roundups on Who Design Today. We’ll show you interesting ideas for mega menu designs in the section of the best mega menu examples.

The mega menu is an ideal choice for large-scale websites or stores such as eCommerce stores and multiple-topic blogs. Popular websites with mega menus will be present in another part of the article.

Mega menus play a leading role in improving website navigation. If your large website comes with a mega menu, lots of benefits will come in. A mega menu can:

Cover all outstanding pages/links of a website: We call the mega menu a comprehensive navigation tool. With only one click, a full list of categories and subcategories will appear. Just staying on that navigation menu, visitors can grab all the most important parts of the website. Then, if they are interested in any page shown on the menu, give one more click to be taken to the destination.
Offer good visibility: Compared to other drop-down menus, the mega menu is home to a variety of categories of different levels. Instead of navigating through multiple layers to reach the destination page, users get a chance to approach all the pages, thus helping increase visibility. Especially for eCommerce stores where product visibility is essential to boosting sales, a mega menu will help a lot.
Make your website more stylish: Building a mega menu with a striking layout is one of the important steps to improve the site’s appearance. You can even add visuals like images and icons to the mega menu to make it more intuitive. Such a modern and eye-catching menu will make your website less boring and create a great first impression on visitors. Icons8, for example, offers a wide range of high-quality menu icons that can enhance your design significantly.
Save time on product/topic search: All the categories and subcategories are organized neatly on the mega menu; therefore, visitors can easily find and access their wanted products or pieces of content. Creating a mega menu is an effective way to optimize the user experience.

Which Kinds of Websites Should We Use Mega Menus For?

Mega menus are not a powerful tool for all types of websites. Therefore, it is important for you to use them in the right place so that you can gain all the advantages it brings.

If you have a small site, it is unnecessary to use a mega menu. In contrast, your website comes with numerous categories and subcategories and you want to find a method for website navigation. In this case, a mega menu should be considered.

Following are the types of websites that can benefit from mega menus. Let’s see!

eCommerce stores: How would the top eCommerce stores like Best Buy, Target, or Walmart guide their visitors without a mega menu? If your store sells many products that can be classified into different categories and subcategories, you are advised to use this kind of menu.
Fashion & clothing stores: Fashion stores’ products are often categorized according to different standards such as brand, feature, style, type, gender, and age. With such a complex system of sections, it is best to use a mega menu to show all the categories in one place.
News websites: A mega menu is not recommended for niche blogs. However, if you are the owner of a news website with tens of topics and categories, you’ll need a mega menu to help visitors easily find the topics they want.
Corporate websites: Large corporate sites include a variety of departments, products, and services. For this reason, many of them want to display a comprehensive layout on the menu so that visitors can clearly imagine how their businesses are organized and what types of services/products they offer.
Hotel & restaurant websites: A mega menu is suitable for these websites because they often have a complex structure. In particular, a hotel website will have to provide visitors with types of rooms and many other services. Similarly, there are a lot of things to show on a restaurant website, for example, recipes, trending meals, and popular combos. Besides, a beautiful design on the menu will help attract visitors. You should also learn how to make a menu to effectively showcases all the necessary information and enhances the user experience.

If you find it necessary to create a mega menu for your website, let’s get to work. Before starting your work, you should spend time looking at the amazing mega menu designs below:

1. Starbucks

2. Walmart

3. Estee Lauder

4. Moosejaw

5. The Sak

6. Daniella Draper

7. Envelopes

8. Fao Schwarz

9. Ford

10. Adobe

11. Oracle

12. Zapier

13. Asana

14. Invision

15. Evernote

16. Adidas

17. Asos

18. Puma

19. Quiksilver

20. ESPN

21. US Magazine

22. PC Mag

23. Food Network

24. Little Palm Island

25. One & Only Cape Town

26. Casa Angelina

There are countless ideas for building a mega menu. However, to make the mega menu work effectively on your website, you should take notice of the following principles:

A mega menu often contains a lot of content which may make people confused once they open the menu. To prevent this situation, you need to keep the mega menu easy to scan. It is necessary to create separate sections within the menu by highlighting them with different headings and bold text. Besides, typography can be a good contributor, while proper space between sections and links is also a need.

Your mega menu display will differ between desktop and mobile. Without being optimized, the mega menu won’t fit the screen size of mobile devices. If you skip the mobile optimization task, you’ll miss out on a great number of mobile visitors. To have a mega menu optimized for mobile, you’ll need a supporting tool that will be mentioned in the next part.

When visiting your website, people often explore your menu first. Therefore, a well-designed mega menu will create a great first impression on visitors.

To build a good-looking mega menu, you should consider doing the things below:

Use only one color for links to avoid making the menu disorganized and unfocused
Add icons or images to highlight options and draw the attention of visitors
Give each section a different layout to diversify the look of the mega menu

Less is more

It is true that the mega menu covers all the things throughout the website. That being said, it doesn’t mean we cram a pile of links into the menu. Instead, so as not to make visitors overwhelmed, you should select the most valuable things on your site to add to the menu.

Besides, keep in mind that the function of the mega menu is to navigate the website. Therefore, you should avoid call-to-action elements. This is not an ideal place to put a newsletter subscription, contact form, or search field.

Group options and order sections logically

There will be a range of sections and subsections within a mega menu. And, you’ll need to organize them scientifically.

Apart from matching options to the right section, you should pay attention to balancing the number of categories. Your options shouldn’t be divided into too many large and small groups. Also, don’t do the converse thing – add only a few sections and each of them shows an overlong list. Both excessive things affect the menu’s appearance and user experience.

In addition, it is recommended to arrange your groups according to different levels of priority. You should place important sections on the left and the links offering less value on the right.

Besides, the title of each group should be short, descriptive, and to the point.

Don’t Exceed Five Columns

Another element you should take notice of is the layout of the mega menu. It is advisable to build fewer than five columns. No matter whether you use text or images for each section, considering the number of columns is a necessary thing. With this number of columns, visitors will gain a better experience while exploring your mega menu.

Hover or Click? This is a common question you deal with when building a mega menu. If you ignore this issue, visitors may have some unexpected problems while scanning your mega menu.

Many users will love to hover because it doesn’t cause time delays. However, hovering makes it easy to mouse away, thus subject to cause losing the menu or a flickering effect. Using a click can solve this problem although it sometimes interrupts the visitor’s journey. Please consider the pros and cons of the two choices before selecting the one for your menu.

We’ve listed some popular principles that are often applied to mega menu designs. That being said, you don’t follow them rigidly. Everything is relative. In some cases, breaking some of them will produce creative mega menu examples.

Surely you’ll want to create an awesome mega menu like the top interesting examples mentioned in the article. Actually, it’s not too difficult to implement this task. First and foremost, you need to find a powerful tool to build mega menus. And it’s time for us to introduce you to Woostify Pro, which helps create your own mega menu without any coding.

Woostify Pro is the advanced version of the Woostify theme that provides users with a variety of amazing features, including Elementor Mega Menu. With this extraordinary add-on, you can create a responsive mega menu with rich content in real-time.

Immediately after activating Elementor Mega Menu in Woostify Pro, you’ll quickly create a menu page and build it in exactly the same way as an Elementor WordPress page. Integrated with Elementor page builder, Woostify Pro allows you to set up different layouts and build any elements on the menu page. On the Elementor dashboard, there are dozens of drag-and-drop widgets that you can use to add text, icons, or images to your mega menu. Elementor Mega Menu has updated the options to customize the menu width and add a link and icon to the mega menu on the main navigation bar.

What’s more, you shouldn’t miss the option to optimize the mega menu for mobile devices in Woostify Pro. It’s a great opportunity to have a responsive mega menu and approach a great number of mobile users.

Read the Elementor Mega Menu doc to learn more details about how to activate, build and optimize the mega menu.

Also, you should watch our mega menu guide video to see how every step is taken.

FAQs on Mega Menus

There are many themes supporting mega menus. Woostify is an example. When upgraded to Woostify Pro, it offers the built-in feature to build a mega menu. You can read the blog’s previous part to see how to create a mega menu with Woostify Pro.

If your theme doesn’t include the mega menu feature, a WordPress mega menu plugin like Max Mega Menu, ElementsKit, and UberMenu can help you. It takes you a few minutes to install and add this functionality to your WordPress site.

The mega menu is a large-scale navigation menu that displays all the options at once. It will be more intuitive with icons and images.

A drop-down menu doesn’t take up much space. It allows users to see the options in different layers if it comes with different sections and subsections.

A mega menu is often more appealing than a normal drop-down menu.

Yes, it does. But making it affect negatively or positively depends on how you use it. When Google crawls your website and finds keywords on your mega menu, it may boost your rankings. That being said, adding too many keywords will be regarded as key stuffing. In this case, your website may suffer from a Google penalty.

Are Mega Menus Good or Bad for Usability?

“Good” or “bad” depends on how you organize the options and optimize the menu for mobile. If it makes your site easy to navigate, it is a user-friendly mega menu. In contrast, a menu that comes with too many options and makes users confused will be considered useless and bad for usability.

Woostify Pro is fully compatible with Elementor. Then, you can create a mega menu using Woostify Mega Menu and Elementor.

The website with a mega menu will look much more appealing. Not only that, it helps boost rankings and improve usability. Lots of benefits you can get from mega menus if you use them properly. It is necessary to consider if a mega menu works well for your website. You can come back to the section Which Kinds of Websites Should We Use Mega Menus For? to come to the right decision. Besides, the mega menu best practices we mentioned above are well worth considering.

The highlight of the article is certainly the top 20+ creative mega menu examples. They are so impressive, right? Don’t hesitate to learn mega menu design ideas from them, combined with your creative talent, to produce perfect mega menu examples.

Now, if you are ready to design a mega menu, please use powerful tools like Woostify Pro and Elementor, which provides a variety of interesting features, to build a good-looking menu.

You also can refer to how to put icon images in the footer of Shopify stores if you want a well-organized footer for enhanced user experience.

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About the author

Brenna Nguyen

Work at the Woostify team as a blogger. Apart from WordPress, I also write about travel experiences, gardening, and games & apps. I spend much of my spare time traveling, reading books, and learning languages.

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