In this article, we have gathered 20 intuitive and out-of-the-box jQuery Navigation Plugins
which not only help you to plan and code your website navigation; but
furthermore go on to define a meaningful, unambiguous way to organize,
arrange, and display content to users.
1. SlimMenu
slimMenu is a lightweight jQuery plugin, which is made to create
responsive and multi-level navigation menus on the fly. With slimMenu,
you’ll no longer struggle with media queries to create responsive menus,
or any other heavy plugins to create multi-level nested menus. slimMenu
does both job for you and it’s only 5KB(2.5KB minified)! It converts an
unordered list with any depth into a menu with sub-menus and, for
smaller screens, the menu becomes a drill-down navigation. It is
touch-friendly and has several options for customization like the
animation or its speed.
Source
2. Smint
Smint is a jQuery plugin that can turn any given element into a sticky
menu instantly. Also, the plugin has support for smooth scrolling (which
is usually used in one-page websites). The plugin is almost plug ‘n’
play and the only customization provided is “scrolling speed”.
Source
3. Mmenu
jQuery.mmenu is a slick plugin that brings the same behavior into any
-mobile- web layout. It transforms unordered lists with unlimited
sub-lists into menu items and has multiple options for customization.
The options include the position of the menu (left/right), if a counter
for the menu items will be displayed or not and more. jQuery.mmenu can
also be controlled (opening, closing and toggling the menu) with simple
functions.
Source
4. FlexNav
FlexNav is another jQuery plugin for easily handling menus in responsive
layouts and it does that well for complex ones too. The plugin has
support for unlimited sub-menus that work similarly in both desktop and
mobile layouts. It has no-JS fallback, works with keyboard-tabs too (for
accessibility) and touch-friendly.
Source
5. Sidr
Sidr is a jQuery plugin for creating “hidden side menus” on-the-fly. It
can be set to be displayed at right or left, a single page can have
multiple side menus and offers multiple methods (existing or remote
content) for loading the content. For responsive layouts, a Sidr menu
can be attached to a button (that is displayed for specific screen sizes
with media -queries) and it’ll be a very handy navigation solution for
small screens.
Source
6. Kwicks
Kwicks, the sliding elements effect which became popular with the old
MooTools page, has a slick jQuery version named “Kwicks For jQuery“.It
has options for customization including the size, max-min width of the
panels, margin between them, duration and easing for the effect and the
behavior to be triggered for the effect. Also, Kwicks can work both
horizontally + vertically and it has an API for interacting with the
elements and the effect.
Source
7. ddSlick
ddSlick, a lightweight jQuery plugin, does that by mimicking the
behavior of list-menus with a better look and more information. It works
as a drop-down menu where we can use images and description besides a
simple text. The data source that populates the drop-down options is
JSON and there are multiple options for customizing the functionality.
The look & feel can be changed as well (very few styles used).
Source
8. jMenu
jMenu 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 (like fadeIn or
slideDown). The markup of the menu is pretty clean as it makes use of
nested lists. The look and feel of the output is set in a CSS file so
updating it without touching the JS code is possible.
Source
9. Navgoco
Navgoco is a simple JQuery plugin which turns a nested unordered list of
links into a beautiful vertical multi-level slide navigation, with
ability to preserve expanded submenus between sessions by using cookies
and optionally act as an accordion menu.
Source
10. Naver
Naver is a jQuery plugin for responsive navigation. It is an easy way to
turn any navigation system into a responsive-ready, mobile-friendly
toggle. The navigation states can be also be animated. It has been
tested in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE7+. It is released under the MIT
License. Feel free to use it in personal and commercial projects.
Source
11. Easy Drop Down
EasyDropDown is a jQuery plugin that effortlessly turns humble elements
into styleable drop-down menus for use in forms or general
UI/navigation. It’s like Chosen but with only the essential features:
clean, semantic markup, form & validation compatibilty, full
keyboard control with textual search, inner-scroll for long lists,
degradation to native UI on touch devices.
Source
12. Menu Aim
menu-aim is a jQuery plugin for dropdown menus that can differentiate
between a user trying hover over a dropdown item vs trying to navigate
into a submenu’s contents. This problem is normally solved using
timeouts and delays. menu-aim tries to solve this by detecting the
direction of the user’s mouse movement. This can make for quicker
transitions when navigating up and down the menu. The experience is
hopefully similar to amazon.com/’s “Shop by Department” dropdown.
Source
13. Horizontal Nav
HorizontalNav is a jQuery plugin that spans a horizontal navigation to
fit the full width of it’s container. If you’ve ever had to create this
effect on a project, you’ll know it’s pretty annoying to do. But this
plugin makes it easy, even on responsive designs.
Source
14. PageScroller
Page Scroller is a powerful JavaScript based smooth scrolling navigation
system that utilizes the robust jQuery library. Created entirely with
ease of use in mind, the plugin will work on any website. You can choose
the positions of the navigation menu, and you can also change the
scrolling speed easily. This smooth scroll plugin requires jQuery v1.3+.
Source
15. jQuery Magic Line Navigation
jQuery Magic Line Navigation allows us to have a highlight of some kind
(a background or an underline) follow you around as you mouse over the
different links in the navigation. This will happen with jQuery and its
animation abilities.
Source
16. TinyNav.js
TinyNav.js is a lightweight plugin (362 bytes) that converts ul and ol
menus into a select dropdown. It also automatically selects the current
page and adds selected=”selected” for that item.
Source
17. jQuery ListNav
jQuery ListNav Plugin supplies an easy way to unobtrusively add a
letter-based navigation widget to any UL or OL list. An easily stylable
(via CSS) nav bar appears above the list, showing the user the letters
A-through-Z.Clicking one of the letters filters the list to show only
the items in the list that start with that letter. Hovering over a
letter (optionally) shows a count above the letter, indicating how many
items will be displayed if that letter is clicked. Other options give
you control over the basic functionality. ListNav works great on long
lists. It supports multiple lists on the same page. And it has been
tested on IE6, IE7, Firefox 2 and 3 (Windows and Mac), Safari (Windows
and Mac).
Source
18. jBreadCrumb
jBreadCrumb is a jQuery plugin for displaying breadcrumb navigations in a
more flexible & smarter way. As the length of a breadcrumb menu may
be very long & the common method used for this problem is limiting
the amount of menus used, jBreadCrumb follows another route. It creates a
collapsible interface that smartly decides the display method according
to the amount and length of the elements.
Source
19. Flaunt.js
Flaunt.js is a jQuery script that allows you to create a responsive,
nested navigation out the box. Flaunt was built to overcome responsive
design challenges which faced a huge percentage of websites. This
challenge was to show nested navigation items on click-demand, without
the event taking you through to the page you’ve pressed.
Source
20. Smart Menus
jQuery website menu plugin. Responsive and accessible list-based website menus that work on all devices.