If I had tried these plugins before writing my “13 essential plugins” article, they would have definitely made the cut.  After trying a couple of mobile menu plugins in the past (for my other site), I had essentially put the change on the back burner.  The existing theme came with a “responsive” menu, but frankly, it looked horrendous and was pretty embarrassing.
Late last night, I decided that it was worth giving it one more shot and looked for another plugin. Â Fortunately, I stumbled across Sevenspark and tried their ShiftNav product (and quickly upgrade to the Pro version). Â While it took me a couple of tries to get it right (let’s just say that I didn’t read the tutorial), it was super easy to implement. Â The key thing is that you have to go into your Menus area and modify each of your nav items if you want them to behave a certain way. Â Easy enough, but leads to frustration if you don’t take a minute to read directions.
I still have some customization to do, but it’s the best plugin of its kind – or certainly among the others I had tried. The best feature is that it easily suppressed my theme’s default menu, so I didn’t have to mess with a lot of code. One key change that I made to make everything look a bit cleaner was add a bit of CSS to hide my standard top menu when the screen gets to a certain size (you can see it on the left screenshot, and when I first implemented the mobile menu it was stacking on top of it, which looked bad).  Also, I had to uncheck the option to shift the body.  Hard lesson learned, but I realized after some time that it was causing some key information not to show up if a user clicked on the “get coupon” button.
Earlier today, I implemented one of their other products, Uber Menu. Â I still have a bit of work to do on that one, as well, but in general it already looks way better than the menu that came with my theme.
If you’re looking for a new mobile menu, definitely give Shiftnav a try – especially because the free option is really good, and the pro version is only $9.
Before and after shots below, but the real magic is in the actual menu usability.
