How to Change a Page’s Title in WordPress without Changing the Corresponding Navigation Item

TL;DR Just want to get to the point? Read how to fix this without the intro.

Occassionally, you may want to update the title of a Page in your WordPress site.

For example, let’s say we’ve got a page titled About. In the Page Editor, that would look something like this:

WordPress Page Editor showing the title as simply "About"

We want to clarify exactly who we’re talking about, so we changed it to About Acme, Inc. Widgets and More. We edit the text, giving us something like this:

WordPress Page Editor updated to our longer, more descriptive text

Feeling satisfied with our change, we update the page and head to the front end of the site. But instead of our nice and neat menu, which maybe looked like this:

example navigation menu

We’ve got the full text of the edited page displaying:

example navigation menu with longer text

That’s not what we wanted, though.

Luckily, we have full control over the navigation text, too.

In WordPress, go to Appearance > Menus.

Find the Menu you’re working with via the Select a menu to edit: dropdown. For themes I build, this is typically called “Primary” when dealing with the menu at the top of all pages, or “Footer” for those at the bottom.

Select the menu, then click the Select button.

You’ll then see a list of rectangles, each representing a navigation item in the menu bar you’re working with. Click the little arrow on the right side of the navigation menu to expand it’s options.

wordpress navigation editor

In the highlighted blue area above, you can simply scrap the additional text, save the menu via the blue Save Menu button, and voila, the front end will now show our concise menu again.

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