Two Easy Steps To Add A Navigation Bar on Blogger (blogspot.com)

Blogger is a popular free blogging platform owned by Google. It offers a lot of easy to use features, suitable for many different blogging needs.

When I first used blogger for my personal blog, I was frustrated by not being able to add a navigation bar below the blog title.  I still often came across many blogs from blogger.com that don’t have an easy-to-use navigation bar.

A blog without a proper navigation bar may discourage the readers’ engagement with the different content.  As a blogger myself, I would prefer to have readers spending more time on my blog, finding more topics and reading as many of them as possible, so help them to locate what they need with a beautiful navigation bar is a must for me.

In this article,  I am going to show you how to add a stylish navigation bar for blogs from Blogger in two easy steps.  

Before I go to the details, I would like to mention that although Blogger has a built-in “Navbar” which has a “search box”, a “share button” and a “Next Blog” tab, this is not the navigation bar that I need to add to my blog.  Actually, I prefer to turn this “Navbar” off by going to the ” Layout” , then edit “Navbar”, scroll down to the “off” radio button to turn this off.

Now I am ready to add a more useful navigation bar that could help users of my blog to find what they want to read – in two easy steps:

Step 1: Using labels to define your navigation bar tabs

After you have a few posts published, choose “labels” under the “Post settings” which is on the right side of your screen, here choose carefully keywords for each of your articles. This is the place you can also add a keyword that you like to use as your tab name. Bear in mind that in order to group articles under different tabs on the navigation bar, include the same keyword in the labels to group the related articles under the same tab.

If I choose “For Girls” as one of my tab on the navigation bar, I should include this phrase into all the labels of the related articles.

Step 2: Create your navigation bar

For creating a navigation bar, select “layout” on the dashboard screen. There is a “Navbar” section on the screen that we mentioned earlier to get rid of.
Now, under the Header section, select ”Add a Gadget”, scroll down to find “labels” to add. You will see a pop up window like this:

Make sure the “title” box is left blank.
After choosing the “selected labels”, using “edit’ to select the keywords you chose for navigation bar tabs.

There is a little tip here:

In order to group the labels the way you want, choose sorting “Alphabetically”. Hence you should choose the keywords wisely when you plan out your navigation bar tabs so that you can sorting all articles in alphabetical order and still be able to present them the way you like.

Under the “display”, make sure not to tick the “Show number of posts per label”.

Now, save.

It is all done. Now you should have a beautiful functional navigation bar on your Blogger’s blog.

For including any new posts under any tabs, make sure to use the specific keywords that appear on the tab.

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I also created a YouTube video to address this issue.     How to Make a Navigation Bar for blogger’ websites (blogspot.com)