35+ Useful jQuery Menu Plugins – Help Users Navigate Better!

With the right jQuery menu plugin your website visitors may get the best and most dynamic navigation available.

jQuery is a lightweight, cross-browser compliant, incredibly awesome and extremely powerful JavaScript framework (library) that emphasizes and simplifies interaction between JavaScript, CSS and HTML. With jQuery, you can change the look and feel of your website into something extraordinary, and it is easier than you think. This way you are providing a different and very dynamic look and feel that users will typically love.

Navigation is one of the most important elements in web design. It has to be neat, usable and creative at the same time in order not to drive your visitors away because they cannot find what they are looking for. jQuery is one of the most powerful tools to enhance your navigation and make it stand out and there are many cool scripts to help you do magic in minutes and not hours. Another great way to present navigation options tp important content is to use jQuery sliders. Sliders are very common today and used e.g. on front pages to feature products and important pages and posts. Check this roundup of slider plugins created for jQuery.

This post will roundup some fresh and cool jQuery menu plugins that will make your menus look awesome. Please leave a comment if I missed out some. Also, consider other jQuery features and plugins e.g. jQuery image zoom. We recently updated this post with new jQuery menu plugins and removed broken links.

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Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.

Now to the jQuery menu plugins

Mac Style Dock Menu in jQuery and CSS – MORE INFO / DEMO

If you are a big Mac fan, you will love this CSS dock menu. It comes with two dock position: top and bottom.

MetroPanel – The New Navigator for Modern Sites – MORE INFO / DEMO

With the division into two panels and a large number of backgrounds and items, you have an infinite number of ways to adapt the menu with this plugin.

Mega Menu Complete Set – MORE INFO / DEMO

This Mega Drop Down Menu Complete Set is perfect for creating unique jquery navigation menu by using one of the 10+ jQuery effects and one of the 13 color variants. Based on a custom grid, this menu allows you to organize your content into columns (from 1 up to 12) with a lot of typography examples such as headings, lists, images styling, tables, form elements, etc.

Fullscreen Site Navigation – MORE INFO / DEMO

This JavaScript plugin lets you build a fullscreen website the quick and easy way. It can be integrated into any cms or website template: it provides only the structure and the algorithm to make it work, the rest is on the designer’s hand.

Metro Flexible Navigation – MORE INFO / DEMO

The Metro Flexible Navigation is a simple, clean grid layout looking a lot like the new Windows 8 interface. It can be customized to be laid out horizontally or vertically. It’s scrollable and drag-able at the same time and contains useful sliding controls. Icons can be changed, there is a large collection available.

UI-Pro – Simple Metro Style Navigation Bar – MORE INFO / DEMO

With this simple jQuery Plugin you can easily create Metro (now simply called Windows 8 UI) style navigation bars. The plugin package comes with the icon pack called iconic created by P.J. Onori, which you can easily set with CSS classes.

Quick & Pro Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

Quick & Pro Menu creates a special style of jQuery mega menus which is only seldom seen in Websites but really cool for giving visitors quick access to a lot of information.

Tabs + Accordion – MORE INFO / DEMO

This a jQuery plugin that simplifies creating responsive tabs and accordions. You can either use one of the included themes or create your own, by picking the colors yourself.

Superfish jQuery menu plugin – MORE INFO / DEMO

Superfish is a JQuery plugin especially dedicated to menus. It allows many improvement from what you can achieve with HTML and CSS as such as hover support for IE6, animations, keyboard accessibility and more.

Smooth Expandable Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

Smooth Expandable Menu is the definitive tool for building minimal vertical expandable menus, which can be easily customized due to its 17 built-in configuration parameters, directly from the html file / script call. The pack includes 3 samples (Serif, San Serif and Tiny), to make easier the integration on any web project.

Menu Maker CSS3 jQuery – MORE INFO / DEMO

This is a JavaScript code that gives you a friendly tools of making a navigation Menu bar with a rounded corner and a smooth animation for search input box. Making navigation menu was never been so easy. All you got to do is dragging the slider bars to change the menu properties.

jQuery Push Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

This is a cool mobile ready mega menu plugin. It is great for featuring e.g. key products with images and text in the navigation area. It is easy to embed videos/images/forms etc. into the mega menu.

QuickAccess Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

Easily customizable, easy to integrate and provides quick access to your site. The code is flexible for the product to be fully responsive. The minimal design was created to fit harmoniously with your site.

Sticklr – Sticky Side Panel jQuery Plugin – MORE INFO / DEMO

Inspired by Envato site-switcher, here is a useful sticky side panel made with CSS and enhanced greatly with jQuery.

Puffer Fish Navigation – MORE INFO / DEMO

Rollover navigation with a glow.

Tree – JQuery Tree Plugin – MORE INFO / DEMO

An easy to install JQuery Plugin that contains more options than most users will ever need. This plugin takes your HTML and turns it into a collapsible menu system with endless numbers of menus within menus. Works great with all major browsers e.g. Chrome, Safari, Firefox and even IE.

Sherpa | Complete Navigation System – MORE INFO / DEMO

As the name suggests, Sherpa is a total solution for all your navigation requirements. Sherpa brings together the three main navigation elements of every interface – Navbar, Sidebar and Sticky Footer.

Slide Down Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

The idea is to make a box with a menu item that slides out, while a thumbnail pops up. We will also include a submenu box with further links for some of the menu items. The submenu will slide to the left or to the right depending on which menu item we are hovering.

Memu – A simple JQuery Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

A small, solid jQuery plugin which is quite easy to use. It’s a menu which can be used with or without JQuery. What’s special about this script is the included plugin jstorage.js (which is some amazing work btw) to store the current item. So if you’re navigating around, the selected item will stay highlighted. This will spare you some server-side code. You can try this one by clicking on the menu item “File -> New”.

JQuery Slick Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

JQuery Slick Menu is a nice, configurable animated menu for your website with lots of configuration options. It is fully W3C compliant and works fine on mobile devices e.g. iPhone and iPad.

Ninja UI – MORE INFO / DEMO

Ninja user interface is skilled in the techniques of JavaScript and CSS, going unnoticed until called upon to perform the arts of webjutsu.

Image Hover Move – MORE INFO / DEMO

A simple and practical navigation or featured image jQuery plugin.

jQuery One Page Navigation Plugin – MORE INFO / DEMO

With this plugin you’ll make the page scroll smoothly when the navigation is clicked. It also automatically highlights the correct navigation section depending upon which section is scrolled to.

skinableTabs – MORE INFO / DEMO

This is an unobtrusive jQuery plugin allowing you to organize your content in attractively skinned tabs.

You can use skinableTabs with multiple positions, skins and transition effects. You can customize the look and feel of any skin in a dedicated CSS file.

Sticky Footer – MORE INFO / DEMO

This Sticky Footer can contain any kind of content and is ready to be used in your website. You can build your own menu and use from 1 to 12 columns to display your content. It degrades gracefully if Javascript is disabled, the jQuery effects are used for enhancements only. It comes in two variants : a fixed width to fit your layout width and a full width taking the whole viewport width.

Dropp – MORE INFO

Dropp is a jQuery plugin which replaces regular dropdown menus ( <select> elements ) with alternatives you can style.

jMenu – MORE INFO / DEMO

This is a jQuery plugin that enables us to create horizontal navigations with unlimited sub-menus. Besides jQuery, it also requires jQuery UI and supports all the effects of this library. The markup of the menu is pretty clean as it makes use of nested lists.

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin – MORE INFO / DEMO

This plugin renders unordered lists into a subway map similar in style to the London Underground map. It emphasizes a clean, aesthetic look with curves and proper placement of markers for stations and interchanges.

mb.verticalSlider – MORE INFO / DEMO

This plugin will let you show long list of elements managing pagination, it can work with elements already in the DOM of your page or loading them via ajax when needed. And it works with mouse wheel of course.

jCrumb – MORE INFO / DEMO

JCrumb is a JQuery plugin for instantly adding breadcrumbs to any webpage without the need to worry about sitemaps, or server side languages.

jQuery Stepy – A Wizard Plugin – MORE INFO

jQuery Stepy is a plugin based on FormToWizard that generates a customizable wizard.

Accordion Menu using jQuery – MORE INFO / DEMO

This plugin offers two options: The menu can be designed to either be toggled by clicking or by simply scrolling over the menu.

jQuery Context Menu – MORE INFO / DEMO

ContextMenuis a lightweight jQuery plugin that lets you selectively override the browser’s right-click menu with a custom one of your own.

Autobrowse Endless Scroller – MORE INFO / DEMO

When run on a DOM element, this plugin will make the element grow and fill its content automatically when the user scrolls to the bottom of the element. The content is fetched via ajax, and the plugin keeps a cache using local storage.

Dustin Betonio

Dustin Betonio is a Translation Management graduate at University of Mindanao. His earlier career was devoted on customer service outside the information highway. Currently studying Law in the same University.