How to Customize Your WordPress Header (3 Easy Methods)

Key Takeaways

• WordPress headers are crucial for navigation and branding across your site.
• Older themes can be customized using the Theme Customizer for logos, colors, and menus.
• Full Site Editing offers block-based header customization with endless layout and design options.
• Page builders like Elementor allow quick header design with visual editing tools.
• You can create multiple headers for different pages or templates to match site needs.

Having a well-designed banner on your WordPress site is perfect for providing a great user experience. Not only does it make navigation easier, but it also looks great from a design perspective.

A lot of themes come with pre-designed headers. However, you can customize them to add links to your social channels, add drop-down menus, and even add a search option. All this can make your site look professional.

With WordPress full site editing, you can create professional-looking headers with the block editor without having to write custom code or rely on a WordPress plugin.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to customize your WordPress header in 3 different ways. I’ll also share with you some advanced header customization techniques along with how to create multiple header templates.

Let’s get started…

What Is a WordPress Header?

The header is the topmost part of a website. It is available at the top of every page on your site. Typically, you’ll see a logo in the header, a website search option, along with basic website navigation menus like Blog, About, Contact Us, etc.

Here’s an example of our Cloudways website header:

You can customize your website header to make it super useful for your visitors by adding promotional banners, call-to-action buttons, social channels, popular pages, and whatnot.

With that said, let’s check out a couple of ways you can go about customizing your WordPress site’s header.

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Methods to Customize Your WordPress Header

If you’re short on time, use the quick navigation links below to jump to different methods to customize your WordPress header.

• Using the WordPress Theme Customizer
• Customizing with Full Site Editing
• Using Page Builders to Create Custom Headers

Method#1: Using the WordPress Theme Customizer

Many WordPress themes still support WordPress theme customizer that you can use to customize the look and feel of your site. For example, I’m using the Twenty Twenty | WordPress Theme, and it supports WordPress theme customizer as it was released before full site editing was introduced in WordPress 5.9.

Keep in mind that this method is for older themes, as newer themes are moving to block-based architecture. We’ll take a look at how to use full site editing to customize your header in the next section, so make sure you stick around.

• To access WordPress Theme Customizer, head to Appearance > Customize. If you don’t see this option, this means your site supports full site editing.

• In the Twenty Twenty theme, there aren’t many options to edit the header. In fact, there is no dedicated section for editing the header. To customize the header, you can go to the ‘Color’ section to change the header color.

• You can also add a search option in the header by heading to the Theme Options.

If you want to add your site’s logo and site title in the header, you can go to the Site Identity option.

That’s pretty much it. As you can see, I don’t have the option to add or remove navigation menus or make further customization in the Twenty Twenty theme.

However, if you’re using a theme that offers a dedicated option to customize the header, for example, Astra, you can make a lot of changes to your site’s header.

• In Astra, you can go to the Header Builder to customize your header.

• Now you can make a ton of changes to my header. For example, I’ll start with updating my navigation menu. To do this, go to the Primary Menu option.

• Now I wanna customize the existing navigation menu.

• To do this, I’ll click on Configure Menu from Here > Primary Menu > + Create New Menu.

• Name your new menu and then click on Next to add pages you’d like to link in the navigation menu.

• Now, if you notice, the existing navigation menu will be removed.

• To add your new menu, click on the + Add Items button.

• Now I’ll add the Home, Pricing, and Login page to my header and then click on the Publish button.

• Now you’ll see the new navigation menu added to my header.

• To add further customization, I can also add social media links in my header. On the customization page, at the bottom, you’ll see an option to add widgets. Like so:

• As you can see, social widgets have been added to my navigation menu.

• Now to add links to the social widgets, click on the social widget you just added.

• Now, a separate menu will appear to add links on the left-hand side. You can add the links from this menu and also change the icons if you wish to do so.

• Now, let’s make some design changes to our header. To do this, we need to go to the DESIGN menu.

• I’ll add an underline effect to my navigation menu.

• I’ll also change the navigation menu text color. After my changes, my text color will be black, on click, it will turn to red, and on hover, it’ll change to blue.

You can make a lot more customization as you like. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll stop here. If we preview our site now, here’s how our header will look like:

It’s not pretty, but it is customized. But as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 🙂

Method#2: Customizing with Full Site Editing

Now we’ll customize our header with the WordPress full site editing feature. For this, I’ll switch to the Twenty Twenty-Four theme. Immediately after changing the theme that supports block-based architecture, you’ll notice the “Customize” option from earlier will be removed, and instead you’ll see an “Editor” option. Click on it to get started.

• When you access the editor, you’ll have endless customization options. To start, I’ll customize the navigation menu as before. It’s too cluttered for me.

• To edit the navigation menu, I’ll simply click on it and then click on Edit.

• I just want the Home, About, and Login pages in my header. Once I’m satisfied, I’ll click Save.

• Here’s my new menu:

• Now let’s add a background color to my header. To do this, select the Row block housing your site title, logo, and navigation menu. After that, head to the block’s settings and locate Background under Color. 

• I added a gradient color to my header. If we preview it, we should see this now:

• Hmm, the navigation menu looks too small and cramped in the corner. Let’s make the text a bit bigger and add some spacing. To do this, I’ll select the Navigation block, head to Styles to change the text size to medium, and add some spacing in between.

• Now, if we preview it, the header should look a lot better:

• Now let’s add a submenu to the navigation. I’ll use it to display different language options. To do this, I’ll simply add the Submenu block and label it Languages. Then I’ll add my submenu items, like this:

• Now let’s preview it:

Now over to you. Experiment with the full site editor to create completely unique navigation headers for your WordPress site.

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Creating Multiple Header Templates

What’s great about WordPress site editor is that you can create different headers for different templates. If you’re new to templates, I suggest you check out our guide on creating custom WordPress page templates.

Also, with the site editor, you can use premade headers using block patterns, making it easy to change the look and feel of your headers.

Let’s say I wanna create a unique separate header for a single page, not for the entire site. To do this, I’ll select a template for which I want to create separate header and then follow the steps below:

• When you’ve picked a template, you’ll see the header that shows up is the one we created earlier. It is important to not edit this header on this template or any other template as this will affect the header on your entire site. So, we’ll delete this header and then create a new one, just for the template we’re working on.
• To delete the header, open up the list view, select Header and click on the ellipses icon > Delete. This will delete the header.

• Now the header is deleted:

• Now we can add a new header to our template. To do this, you can either create a new header from scratch or use a premade pattern header.
• I’ll go with the premade header route as we have already seen how to design headers from scratch earlier. To use premade header, I’ll head to Patterns > Headers and the select a header pattern of my choice that will only appear on a single page/post where I use my custom template, not my entire site.

• Here’s how my template will look like with the premade pattern header:

Method#3: Using Page Builders to Create Custom Headers

Another option to customize your header is to use a page builder. This option might not be the best if you’re using a custom theme with strict layout rules that don’t allow overriding its header with a page builder.

But if you’re starting your site from scratch, a page builder can be a great option.

For this part, I’ll use the free version of Elementor (limited customization options).

• To get started, click on Appearance > Customize.

• Next, click on the Header & Footer option.

• Then click on the Start Designing option to edit the header with Elementor.

• Next, click on the “Header Theme Header” option.

• We’ll keep the customization simple here, as the free version doesn’t offer a lot of customization options. So… I’ll just change the color options to show you how you can simply tweak around different options to customize your header to your liking.

• Here’s how my header will look after customizing the color.

Conclusion

So, this wraps up our guide on customizing WordPress headers. We looked at 3 different methods to customize WordPress headers: Using WordPress Theme Customizer, through Full Site Editing, and using page builders like Elementor.

We even looked at how to use WordPress templates so you can create different headers for different pages.

Customizing WordPress headers can make your site look professional and improve website navigation.

If you think I’ve missed something, do let me know in the comments.