Primary Navigation

What is Primary Navigation in Crimson?

Primary Navigation is the main menu bar in your header — usually the set of links visitors expect everywhere (Home, About, Contact, etc.). Crimson uses Ghost’s built-in Primary navigation section for this menu.

Primary Navigation

Where to edit it in Ghost Admin

1. Go to Ghost Admin → Settings → Navigation

2. Click the Customize link which will open a Navigation popup

3. Click Primary tab

4. Add, update, delete, or reorder menu items

5. Click Save to save the navigation menu

Navigation Settings

Primary Navigation

How to add a menu item

Each nav item has:

• Label (text shown in the menu)

• URL (where it links)

To add a page you created in Ghost Ghost does not automatically add new pages to navigation. You need to:

1. Open your published page

2. Copy the URL

3. Paste it into a new navigation item under Settings → Navigation

Tip: Add tag/category links easily Ghost tags automatically have archive URLs like:

• /tag/news/

• /tag/podcast/

You can use these as “Categories” links in your navigation.

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Creating dropdown menus

Crimson supports dropdown navigation. The easiest way to build a dropdown is:

1. Add a parent item and set its URL to #

2. Add child items whose labels start with - (dash)

Example (Primary dropdown)

• Custom Pages → #

• -Account → /account/

• -Tags → /tags/

• -Archive → /archive/

Dropdown Settings in Primary Navigation

This will render “Custom Pages” as a dropdown with the child links beneath it.

Dropdown Rendered in Primary Navigation

Important dropdown warning

In Crimson, the very last menu item cannot be a dropdown parent that links to #, or the navigation may fail to render.

If your last item must be a dropdown parent, add one normal link after it.

In Short: There should not be an empty dropdown parent without any dropdown children under it.

Primary Navigation best practices

1. Keep it simple: aim for 4–6 main links

2. Use it for “always-needed” pages: Home, About, Services, Contact, Membership

3. Avoid stuffing categories here (put categories into Secondary navigation instead)

How it behaves on mobile

On smaller screens, Primary navigation becomes the hamburger menu, while Secondary navigation scrolls horizontally.

Primary Navigation on Mobile device

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Troubleshooting

My dropdown doesn’t appear or appears broken

• Confirm the parent URL is exactly #

• Confirm children labels start with -

• Confirm your last nav item is not a parent linking to #

My menu link goes to a 404

• Make sure the page is published and is accessible using it's direct link

• Make sure the URL includes the correct path