100+ Excellent jQuery Plugins for Navigation and Menus

100+ Excellent jQuery Plugins for Navigation and Menus

By Mehreen Ali

After the successful publish of our post 100 jQuery Plugins for Image Galleries with Source Files, many people demanded jQuery Plugins that are currently being used for Navigation & Menus, so here is another most useful and important post. Now this time we have collected jQuery Plugins for Navigation and Menus. Hope like the previous post you will also feel it useful and important post.

1. White Smoke Menu Style :

Nice and beautiful jQuery plugin having impressive features like, Full cross-browser compatibility, Fully accessible even when javascript is turned off, as a pure css menu, Search engines optimized, Clear unordered list (LI and UL HTML tags) structure of jQuery menu, Easy to setup and update, Fantastic animation and transition effects, Multiple pre-designed color schemes, Completely customizable styling with CSS, Powered by jQuery, Extremely small – 3kb uncompressed.

2. Urban Gray Accordion Menu Script :

Urban Gray Accordion Menu is a clean, vertical menu with headers that are activated “mouseover” (200 millisec delay). Each header is hyperlinked itself, feasible since the headers are toggled “mouseover” instead of “onclick”. This is an easy to customize, attractive vertical list menu.

3. Bullet List Accordion Menu :

In this menu example, the menu headers are H3 tags, with each sub menu being UL tags that expand/ contract. A CSS class gets dynamically added to a header when it’s expanded to style the expanded header. The headers are toggled via “click” of the mouse, and all headers can be collapsed. The previous expanded header (if any) is closed before expanding the current.

4. Arrow Side Menu :

Arrow Side Menu is a vertical list based menu that uses a single background image to create 3 distinct state. Headers that contain sub contents are activated via “clickgo” of the mouse. What this means is that each header is hyperlinked, with the link not disabled. When you click on such a header, first, the sub content expands, then, the user is taken to the URL specified in the header.

5. Apple Style Accordion Menu :

This menu mimics the look of the vertical menu found on certain areas of Apple.com. The headers are toggled via “mouseover” over each one (after 200 millisec delay), and the previous expanded header (if any) is closed before expanding the current. One header is forced to remain open at any time, by setting the parameter onemustopen: true. Note that this menu requires v1.5 or newer of the ddaccordion.js file to work. Menu structure wise, the menu consists simply of DIV tags instead of the typical UL and LI elements found in a standard menu.

6. Glossy Accordion Menu :

In this example, the menu headers are A tags, with each sub menu being DIV tags that expand/ contract. The use of DIV tags for the sub menus is to facilitate content other than UL lists. An absolutely positioned icon image gets dynamically added to each header that changes depending on the header state. The headers are toggled via “click” of the mouse, and all headers can be collapsed.

7. Mega Drop Down Menu :

This drop down menu is best for huge number of inventory and categories navigation bars.

8. Tabbed Structure Menu :

Tabbed Interface or Tabbed Structure Menu is getting really famous in web design & development. This tutorial will show you how to build your own tabbed Interface using jQuery with slideDown/slideUp effect. Be sure to check out the demo, you definetely will like it.

9. Bounce out Vertical Menu :

A simple bounce out vertical menu with the help of little bit css3 and jquery framework. Beautiful navigation menu can stand out your website from the crowd of creative navigation. That’s why we tried to create vertical menu which on mouse hover give a nice bounce out sliding effect.

10. jQuery (mb)Menu 2.7 (New!) :

This is a powerful jQuery component to build easily a multilevel tree menu or a contextual menu (right click) in an intuitive way! You can add as many submenus as you want; if your submenu or menu is not declared in the page, the component’ll get it via ajax calling the template page with the id of the menu you need (the value of “menu” attribute) the ajax page should return a well formatted code as the example below for the menu voices code.

11. Filled Navigation Menu using Sprites :

Sprites date back to the early days of video games, where they were used as optimization technique for displaying 2D graphics. A CSS sprite is a technique that involves grouping images to form a single master image, and then selectively displaying only the required sections using CSS attributes (width, height, background-position etc).

12. Animated Menu :

Nice jQuery codes to make your navigation bar as animated. Animation will start when you will bring your mouse pointer over the Menu Item.

13. Vertical Scroll Menu :

Create a vertical scroll menu that scroll automatically according to your mouse axis-Y movement. This tutorial will cover some jquery tips, tricks, and plugin.

14. Multilevel Menu Style :

Excellent jQuery plugin to make drop down navigation bar, having these beautiful features, Full cross-browser compatibility, Fully accessible even when javascript is turned off, as a pure css menu, Search engines optimized, Clear unordered list (LI and UL HTML tags) structure, Easy to setup and update, Fantastic animation and transition effects, Multiple pre-desinded color schemes, Completely customizable styling with CSS, Powered by jQuery, Extremely small – 3kb uncompressed.

15. Coda Slider :

Coda-Slider is a jQuery plugin I first released in September, 2007. It aimed to mimic the slider effect on the promo page for Panic’s Coda software. That initial version was hacked together, and I made two small updates within a few months of its release. Coda-Slider 2.0 has been built from the ground up, and should prove much more versatile and easier to use than its predecessors.

16. Tab Navigation with Smooth Horizontal Sliding :

It is a navigation menu that slides horizontally. It begins with a set of “tabs” on the right side of a containing element. When clicked, a tab slides to the left to reveal a group of links. Click the tab again, and it slides back.

17. Cool Animated Navigation :

Animation and visual feedback are great ways to assist a user in navigating and interacting with a website. While traditionally Adobe’s Flash was the goto for anything animated, these days with the magic of javascript we can avoid Flash altogether. Today we’re going to build a really cool animated navigation menu using just CSS and jQuery.

18. Vimeo Like Navigation Bar :

Excellent navigation bar using jQuery and CSS.

19. BDC DrillDown Menu :

Looks simple but interesting and important jQuery plugin. This page contains a number of examples, but all of the examples use the same basic structure. This structure has one menu panel that is longer than the menu itself, so it’ll display scroll buttons as appropriate. Since this is on every menu (and since there’s no option to control it…it’s based solely on the size of the menu panels), it doesn’t have its own example…all of the examples have one scrolling panel.

20. Listmenu :

This jQuery plugin, developed in the iHwy Labs, allows you to easily convert a long, hard to navigate list into a compact, easily skimmable ‘first-letter’ based menuing system, allowing quick and ‘out-of the-way’ access to hundreds of items. Users hover their mouse over a letter and a columnized list of all of the list items that start with that letter appear in a submenu. Mousing off of the letter or menu closes the submenu. Mousing between letters is very fast and the columns in the submenu are nicely balanced.

21. Drop Down Menu :

Nice, simple but attractive navigation menu, having these features, Full cross-browser compatibility, Fully accessible even when javascript is turned off, as a pure css menu, Search engines optimized, Clear unordered list (LI and UL HTML tags) structure of jQuery dropdown menu, Easy to setup and update, Fantastic animation and transition effects, Multiple pre-desinded color schemes, Completely customizable styling with CSS, Powered by jQuery, Extremely small – 3kb uncompressed

22. jBreadCrumb Menu :

With a little help from jquery user “mikejbond”, the chevron overlay div no longer needs to be part of the HTML, it is inserted dynamically. You may still want include it if you want to cache image on page load. Also, the easing plugn is no longer required, the animation will default to “swing” easing. I still recommend “easeOutQuad” for the best looking animation, but it’s not necessary.

23. Kwicks for jQuery :

Kwicks for jQuery started off as a port of the insatiably attractive Mootools effect (of the same name), but has evolved into a highly customizable and versatile widget. Please check out the examples to see it in action.

24. Vertical Sliding Menu :

Simple sliding vertical menu using jQuery, nice and effective plugin.

25. Sexy Drop Down Menu :

Studies show that top navigations tend to get the most visual attention when a user first visits a site. Having organized and intuitive navigation is key — and while most drop down menus may look aesthetically pleasing, developing them to degrade gracefully is also essential. In this tutorial I would like to go over how to create a sexy drop down menu that can also degrade gracefully.

26. Apple Style Menu :

Elegance navigation bar having Apple Style menu, on mouse over thumbnail would be displayed.

27. Image Menu :

Nice Image menu, having Accordion effect, on mouse over picture will display completely.

28. jQDock :

Transform a set of images into a Mac-like Dock menu, horizontal or vertical, with icons that expand on rollover!

29. Smooth Animated Menu :

Ever seen some excellent jQuery navigation that left you wanting to make one of your own? Today we’ll aim to do just that by building a menu and animate it with some smooth effects.

30. jQuery ID Tabs :

Simple jQuery plugin to create Tabs.

31. Attractive Menu with Fade in and Fade out effect :

An attractive menu with more advanced CSS and simple jQuery script. It uses jQuery builtin fadein and fadeout effect.

32. Slide Subnav :

A horizontal sliding submenu. Has a couple of options and the appearance can be modified in the css.

33. Stylish Navigation Menu :

Stylish Navigation menu using CSS, XHTML and jQuery library. On mouse over individual menu would be scrolling vertically and other menu would come while scrolling vertically.

34. Slick Tabbed Content Area :

One of the biggest challenge to web designers is finding ways to place a lot of information on a page without losing usability. Tabbed content is a great way to handle this issue and has been widely used on blogs recently. Today we’re going to build a simple little tabbed information box in HTML, then make it function using some simple Javascript, and then finally we’ll achieve the same thing using the jQuery library.

35. Hover Accordion :

This is yet another accordion script, except you don’t have to click to open one item, you just move your mouse over it.

36. ‘Mootools Homepage’ Inspired Navigation :

As you know there are a host of competing javascript libraries around these days. Though I prefer jQuery, I’ve always liked the way the menu on MooTools worked. So in this tutorial we’ll recreate that same effect … but we’ll do it in jQuery!

37. jQuery CSS Drop Down Menu :

Simple navigation bar, having the features, Full cross-browser compatibility, Fully accessible even when javascript is turned off, as a pure css menu, Search engines optimized, Clear unordered list (LI and UL HTML tags) structure, Easy to setup and update, Fantastic animation and transition effects, PalmPre style, Multiple pre-desinded color schemes, Completely customizable styling with CSS, Powered by jQuery, Extremely small – 3kb uncompressed

38. TreeView :

Lightweight and flexible transformation of an unordered list into an expandable and collapsable tree, great for unobtrusive navigation enhancements. Supports both location and cookie based persistence.

39. Hover Top Display Navigation :

When designing a new site, web designers usually face the age-old question: vertical or horizontal navigation? There are pros and cons to both solutions. One example being horizontal navigation limits the number of links you can have due to a limited page width. This is usually solved by including a drop down system. However, if you are attempting to make your particular site stand out, you might consider thinking outside the “norm”.

40. LavaLamp :

Animated Navigation, on mouse over, hover image will scroll and come underneath the current item.

41. Color Fading Menu :

Nice and Simple Hover effect.

42. A Sliding Menu :

Here is jQuery plugin using jQueryUI for sliding effect.

43. KeyPress Navigation :

A nice Navigation in which you will learn how to let the user make use of their keyboard to get around your site.

44. Animated Drop Down with Zebra Table :

Drop down menus are a really convient way to fit a large menu into a really small initial space. For a long time people have just used a form element for standard drop downs, but with minimal effort you can create a much slicker effect using jQuery and CSS.

45. MenuMatic :

MenuMatic is a MooTools 1.2 class that takes a sematic ordered or unordered list of links and turns it into a dynamic drop down menu system. For users without javascript, it falls back on a CSS menu system based on Matthew Carroll’s keyboard accessible flavor of Suckerfish Dropdowns by Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb.

46. jGlide :

jGlideMenu is an updated version of the fastFind Menu that supports inline and AJAX menu definitions and uses an easier syntax than the original version. Better documentation will be provided with future versions.

47. iPod DrillDown & Flyout Style :

We got lots of fantastic feedback on our earlier iPod-style menu, and decided to upgrade it for jQuery 1.3. In the process of refining the script, we morphed it into more of a menu system, which can be used to create a simple dropdown menu for a single list of options, a flyout menu for a smaller hierarchical list of options where child menus are displayed next to the parent menu on mouseover, and two variations on the iPod style, one with a back button and another with a linked breadcrumb to let users easily traverse back up the hierarchy.

48. Background Position :

After reading Dave Shea’s article on CSS Sprites using jQuery to produce animation effects, I felt like playing around with things to see what could be done but accomplish it with a simpler HTML structure (no need for adding superfluous tags) and simpler code, too.

49. DropDown Menu :

Dropdown menus and menu bars have been heavily used since the early days of graphical user interfaces. Their use has become ubiquitous, and even expected, in desktop applications, and the web has quickly followed suit. This article is intended to describe an extremely basic, yet extremely powerful, technique for adding dropdown menus in your application user interface or website design.

50. Pagination :

When you have a a large list of items (e.g. search results or news articles), you can display them grouped in pages and present navigational elements to move from one page to another. This plugin creates these navigational elements.

51. Flickr Menu :

This tutorial will explain a simple step-by-step way to implement an Flickr Horizontal Menu Demo in Jquery and CSS.

52. GarageDoor Effect :

Beautiful effect of Garage Door on mouse over to any item in Navigation bar.

53. Beautiful Accordion Style :

Learn how to create the well-known javascript accordion with the most minimal amount of html, css, javascript code and of course, with a beautiful interface as well.

54. Mega DropDown Menu :

55. Highlight Sliding Menu :

This sliding hover effect script is an easy method to add some flavor to your navigation. Using the CSS you can easily customize the navigation to fit your “look and feel”. The markup for the script is very simple as below.

56. UVumi Tools DropwDown :

The UvumiTools Dropdown Menu is the menu featured on this website. It is a very simple multi-level menu built from an HTML unorderd list, using Mootools Javascript Framework. We needed a simple and lightweight menu that can be easily updated by simply editing a <ul> HTML element.

57. Giva Lab mcDropDown :

For our help desk, customer service and call center software applications, we needed to develop a unique UI control that would allow users to select from a complex hierarchical tree of options. We wanted this control to be intuitive and it had to allow for both quick mouse and keyboard entry.

58. Floating Menu :

For all of us who deal with long web pages and need to scroll to the top for the menu, here’s a nice alternative: floating menus that move as you scroll a page. This is done using HTML, CSS and jQuery, and it’s fully W3C-compliant.

59. Fresh Content Accordion :

When developing a website, it is a great challenge to be able to organize the content in such a way, that it is both intriguing and eye-catching. Not to mention how important it is to prevent information overloading by exposing your visitors to too much data in a single view.

60. Slide out and Drawer Effect :

The effect is commonly known as an ‘accordion’ and it’s usually used to slide up, or down blocks of content to expose new blocks.

61. Dock & Stack :

Just about every website uses the regular navigation concepts we’re all used to. After awhile this can get pretty boring, especially for designers who thrive on creativity. While mimicking the OS X dock and stacks isn’t new, it’s certainly not common.

62. Sproing :

In an ongoing attempt to offer alternative methods to spruce up menus, I’ve pieced together an elastic thumbnail menu. What does it do exactly? Magnifies menu items when they are hovered over. Menu items expand upwards.

63. UI Selectmenu :

An ARIA-Accessible Plugin for Styling a Custom HTML Select Element

64. Beautiful Slide out Navigation :

Create an amazing slide out menu or navigation for your website. The navigation will be almost hidden – the items only slide out when the user hovers over the area next to them. This gives a beautiful effect and using this technique can spare you some space on your website. The items will be semi-transparent which means that content under them will not be completely hidden.

65. Overlay Effect Menu :

Create a simple menu that will stand out once we hover over it by covering everything except the menu with a dark overlay. The menu will stay white and a submenu area will expand. We will create this effect using jQuery.

66. Collapsing Site Navigation :

Create a collapsing menu that contains vertical navigation bars and a slide out content area. When hovering over a menu item, an image slides down from the top and a submenu slides up from the bottom. Clicking on one of the submenu items will make the whole menu collapse like a card deck and the respective content area will slide out.

67. Thumbnails Navigation :

Create an extraordinary gallery with scrollable thumbnails that slide out from a navigation. We are going to use jQuery and some CSS3 properties for the style. The main idea is to have a menu of albums where each item will reveal a horizontal bar with thumbnails when clicked. The thumbnails container will scroll automatically when the user moves the mouse to the left or right.

68. jQuery Coda Slider Effect :

Although Panic didn’t really invent the effect, the sliding panels on the Coda is great implementation of this effect. This article will pick apart the pieces required to create the effect, and how to better it.

69. Simple Spy Effect :

The great thing about Realmac’s QuickSnapper site is that if JavaScript is turned off, the list of snaps is visible by default. So we’ll follow suit. It’s also worth noting that their version only keep pulling in new items until it hits the end. I’ll show you how you can keep the list looping, and in a follow up tutorial I’ll show you how to hook this in to an Ajax hit that doesn’t hammer your server and keeps the effect nice and smooth.

70. Awesome Cufonized Flyout Menu :

A full page cufonized menu that has two nice features: when hovering over the menu items we will move a hover-state item that adapts to the width of the current item, and we will slide out a description bar from the left side of the page, reaching towards the current menu item.

71. Little Box Menu :

A menu out of little boxes that animate randomly when a menu item is clicked. The clicked menu item expands and reveals a content area for some description or links. When the item is clicked again, the boxes will come back, reconstructing the initial background image.

72. Radial Menu :

A Radial Menu, you can rotate it Clockwise/Anti Clockwise, you can also shuffle the items. Very nice radial menu.

73. ImagineMenu :

imagineMenu is a jQuery plugin that lets you imagine all your *image menu* problems far away! Few words about imagineMenu(): Makes creating image based menus a snap, based on progressive enhancement, so the menu works even when JS is off, just in a bit raw (no-image) version, degrades gracefully when images are off, thanks to tweaked Gilder/Levin Method for image replacement, which in original requires an additional span (imagineMenu() adds that on the fly so your HTML remains sexy) and has some problems with enlarged fonts (imagineMenu() fixes that by setting <a>’s overflow to hidden, so no font will stick out its toes at the bottom of menu when font is enlarged),utilises image sprites to minimise number of http requests and deal with preloading of hovered menu items, works with metadata plugin (not fully tested).

74. TY Drop DownMega Menu :

Instead of scrolling the long menu, it is the best solution to make long menu like this.

75. Adoptable Menu :

Vertical Navigation bar, opening submenu on Mouse Over.

76. Corporate Navigation Bar :

Simple Corporate Navigation bar having features, Full cross-browser compatibility, Fully accessible even when javascript is turned off, as a pure css menu, Search engines optimized, Clear unordered list (LI and UL HTML tags) structure, Easy to setup and update, Fantastic animation and transition effects, Multiple pre-desinded color schemes, Completely customizable styling with CSS, Powered by jQuery, Extremely small – 3kb uncompressed

77. AutoSprites :

This plugin now contains support for an active state. It is just as easy to use and all of the animation still works with it. Read below to see how it works.

78. Red Vertical Glide Navigation :

Simple vertical red Navigation bar with mouse over submenu.

79. Finder-like column view from hierarchical lists :

Mac OS X’s Finder features a nifty NeXT throwback – the column view. This lets you browse through a hierarchy of files in a relatively compact space, and still see your path through directory structure.

80. DropDown Menu with Infinit Submenu :

jQuery.dropmenu is a plugin which takes a standard HTML-list (UL-element) and turns it into a dropdown-menu with (in theory an infinite amount of) submenu’s. It is easy to install and style with CSS. The plugin is designed to be quickly applied: Most of the configuration like heights, widths and distances are calculated automatically.

81. Droppy :

Quick and dirty nested drop-down menu in the jQuery styleee. I needed a nav like this for a recent project and a quick Googling turned up nothing that really suited, so droppy was born. It hasn’t been designed with flexibility in mind – if you like what you see, great, integration should be a breeze – otherwise I’d look for something more configurable elsewhere.

82. Scrolling Color Glide :

Dynamic menu with scrolling color glide followed, appropriate for personal entertainment blog and website which requires newfashioned style and personalization.

83. Flex Level Drop Down Menu :

More robust than a regular menu bar, this flexible menu script lets you add a multi level drop down menu to any link on the page. A close relative of Flex Level Pop Up Menu, each menu can either drop down or to the right of the anchor element (useful when the link is a side bar link). The menus intelligently reposition themselves when too close to the browser edges. Structure wise each drop down menu is simply defined as a regular nested UL on the page, making it very intuitive to set up, not to mention search engine friendly.

84. Flyout Ribbon :

Flyout Ribbon is a simple jQuery plugin for creating a highly customizable flyout ribbon. This plugin is perfect for providing users with a plethera of options in an unobtrusive manner. With 1 mouse click you can show or hide all developer defined options.

85. HoverScroll :

This plugin makes an html unordered list [<ul>] scrollable just by hovering the mouse over it.

86. Omni Slide Menu :

Omni Slide Menu is an super versatile slideout menu that reacts to the mouse hovering over and out of it. It supports enough features to make your head roll, though the default setup only takes a second to implement. All settings to the menu is done inside an external .js file.

87. jDrawer :

This is based on the JavaScript “drawer” module that appeared on Apple and YooTheme. I figured it deserved a jQuery equivalent.

88. Slash Dot Menu :

This is a stylish collapsible menu modelled after the navigational menu found on Slashdot. Configure the menu in a multitude of ways, such as which sub menus to expand by default, whether to persist menu states using cookies, to the speed in which menu items expand/ collapse.

89. Floating Menu :

This cross-browser menu stays static on the left hand corner of the browser via a gentle “floating” action. The result is an non-abrupt, smooth transition to reappearing into view for the menu.

90. Context Menu :

This jQuery script lets you associate a multi-level context menu to any element on the page, so right clicking within the element activates the menu. The default context menu of the browser is suppressed as a result. A different context menu can be added to different elements on the page, such as one for the document as a whole, another for just a DIV on the page etc.

91. jOrbital :

jOrbital is a solution for building circular menus. It’s purpose is to group elements with similar functionality ( like social buttons ) into one hoverable button.

92. Mouse Over Tabs :

This is a mouseover tabs menu. Move the mouse over designated links, and additional sub menu contents appear in a separate DIV below it. Think of it as an inline two level menu. Specify which tab should be selected when the page loads in two different ways, plus whether the sub menu contents should disappear when the mouse rolls out of that area.

93. Auto Paging :

You don’t need to waste time now, just make it automatic. This is nice and best choice for you to do so.

94. jQuery Finder :

The purpose of this plugin is to provide an alternative to treeview navigation.

95. TimePickr :

jquery.timepickr was created in a attempt to make the process of inputing time in a form as easy and natural as possible.

96. mbScrollingMenu :

mbScrollingMenu is a jQuery plugin that transforms an HTML list with a list following the auto-scroll position of the mouse. So you can afford to have a menu, a timeline or a list of important photographs you while passing the scroll bar.

97. mMenu JQuery Plugin (Image Based) :

mMenu is a feature rich jQuery plugin that comes with an image manipulating php-script.

98. MultiColor Animated DropDown Menu :

Looks like simple but effective MultiColor Animated DropDown Menu using jQuery.

99. NavDoc :

The most beautiful DOC style menu created using jQuery.

100. Scalable Menu :

A simple menu that will stand out once we hover over it by covering everything except the menu with a dark overlay. The menu will stay white and a submenu area will expand. We will create this effect using jQuery.

101. Awesome Slide Down Box Menu :

A unique sliding box navigation. The idea is to make a box with the menu item slide 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.

102. SliderNav (Apple Style) :

SliderNav is a plugin that lets you add dynamic, sliding content using a vertical navigation bar (index). It’s made mainly for alphabetical listings but can be used with anything, though longer words look a little awkward

103. styleSelect Menu :

This jQuery plugin replaces the standart select element with a custom looking selectbox. Plugin has keyboard support.