WordPress navigation between your posts and between your pages is a little cumbersome when you’re trying to make changes to many of them at once.
For example, if you decide you change SEO plugins and want to edit all of your pages, or change your featured images, or layouts, or implement an excerpt, you normally need to
- Show all pages
- Select the page you want
- Make your changes and save
- Repeat steps 1 to 3
What if you could eliminate one of those steps?
There are two plugins that will help you do just that.
One of them is new and called “Fast Page Switch” and is pretty new. This gives you a drop down list of your pages while you’re in a page.
The other has been around for a little bit, “Admin Post Navigation”. It allows you to go to either the previous or next post without having to go to the list of posts.
We’ll look at both quickly.
WordPress Navigation with Fast Page Switch
This plugin adds a metabox to the edit screen for pages. The metabox lets you quickly switch between all available pages using the Select2 jQuery plugin.
You simply install it and it is always available.
I installed it on my starter site, and here is what it looks like as I have these pages: Home, Blog, About, Contact Us, Styles, and within Styles, I have multiple pages.
You can see that it will indent a child page for you.
You can also type in the box (typeahead) if you have a lot of pages and need to get to something quicker.
This may be one you want to remove before delivering the website to a customer, but for sure it’s handy when you’re developing a website.
**Update: The lastest version also displays the list of posts as well as pages. So you can switch quickly between a page or a post or between multiple posts or between pages.
WordPress Navigation with Admin Post Navigation
This plugin adds “← Previous” and “Next →” links to the “Edit Post” admin page if a previous and next post are present, respectively. The link titles (visible when hovering over the links) reveal the title of the previous/next post. The links link to the “Edit Post” admin page for the previous/next posts so that you may edit them.
It works with Custom Post Types also, which is super important to me.
There are several customizations you can do at the “Other Notes” page, that you can add into your functions.php file. Unfortunately, the one of ordering the posts does not work. But renaming of the previous and post text works.
And here are the results:
Conclusion
Whether or not you keep these plugins activated, if you’ve got to navigate quickly between lots of post or pages, these two plugins will save you time, and make your WordPress Navigation much much faster.
And I’m all about saving time!
