Add meaningful tooltips to your WordPress menu links with Page Menu Editor

For a comprehensive alternative, see also Page Lists Plus

By default, WordPress takes the title we give to a page and uses it in four different places:

The problem

1. In the title element of the (X)HTML head.
2. In the menu link as the link text.
3. In the menu link as the title attribute. (The title attribute is generally recommended for usability and accessibility. In graphical browsers, it is usually displayed as a tooltip when the link is hovered over.)
4. As the heading of the page content.

This, re-using the anchor text as the title attribute:

• is not useful in general;
• is not helpful for accessibility;
• is not user-friendly;
• may not be search-engine-friendly either.

Currently (in version 2.6 of WordPress) it is not possible to enter manually a title attribute for page links.

The solution

“Page Menu Editor”, a new plugin by SarahG, offers exactly this option:

Home: www.stuffbysarah.net/blog/wordpress-plugins/page-menu-editor
wordpress.org: wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-menu-editor

After installing Page Menu Editor, two new boxes appear when a page is created or edited. The second is for the title attribute of the link.

Here I’ve just entered a title for the link “Sitemap”:

The result:

The other box—“Page Menu Label (optional)”—is for changing the link text. This can be useful if, for instance, you want to use a short title in the menu link (e.g., “About”) but a more expressive heading within the page (e.g., “About this site”).

Thanks for reading!

Links

HOME PAGE OF PAGE MENU EDITOR

• Page Menu Editor

OTHER LINKS

If you want to modify the title element of pages and posts (no. 1 in the illustration above), you can use a plugin that manages data in the head element of XHTML pages, like Headspace2:

• HeadSpace2 — Versatile and modular metadata manager for WordPress. Can be used for various tasks, including SEO.

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