Editing site navigation

The main menu at the top of your site and the footer links at the bottom are edited in two globals: Header and Footer. Both live under the Globals section of the Payload sidebar.

Header menu

Opening it

1. Sidebar → Globals → Header.
2. You'll see the list of top-level nav items.

Adding a top-level link

1. Scroll to the bottom of the nav items and click + Add.
2. Fill in the fields:
   • Title — the text visitors see in the menu. This field is localized — see Working with languages if your site supports more than one language.
   • URL — where the link points. Use a relative path like /products/hoses for internal links, or a full https://... URL for external ones.
   • Has Sub Links — tick this if the item should open a dropdown with child links.

Adding sub-links (dropdowns)

After ticking Has Sub Links on a top-level item, a new Items section appears below it. Click + Add to add sub-links. Each sub-link has the same Title and URL fields, and can itself have Has Sub Links ticked to go one level deeper.

The menu supports up to three levels deep. That's the limit — at the third level, the "Has Sub Links" option is hidden.

Reordering

Hover over a nav item's row. A drag handle (≡) appears on the left. Drag to reorder.

Removing a link

Click the three dots (⋯) on the item's row and choose Remove. The link is gone from the draft; save to make it live.

Footer

The footer works the same way — Globals → Footer — but it's typically structured as columns of links rather than a single menu. You'll see fields for each column's heading and the links it contains.

Additional footer content (legal links, social media icons, company registration details, etc.) lives in other fields on the same form. Scroll down to see everything that's editable.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Using absolute URLs for internal links. https://your-site.com/about works, but /about is better — it keeps working if the site domain changes and it's slightly faster for visitors.
• Linking to pages that don't exist yet. Check the URL resolves on the live site before or immediately after saving. Payload won't warn you about broken links.
• Long menu titles. Keep top-level titles short (one or two words). Long titles break the menu layout on tablets and smaller screens.
• Forgetting to translate. If your site has more than one language, a missing translation falls back to the default language, which often looks like a bug to customers in other regions.

After you save

The menu updates on the live site within a few seconds. Refresh the public site in a separate tab to confirm — open it in an incognito window to make sure you're not seeing a cached version from your browser.

If a link still looks wrong after 30 seconds, it's almost always a browser cache issue rather than a Payload issue.