Understanding Your Site’s Structure
How menus, page templates, and parent/child pages relate to each other.
Your website is more than a collection of pages — it has a structure that connects everything together. Understanding how that structure works will help you know what you can change and what to leave alone.
Navigation Menus
The links in the top navigation bar of your site (and any footer menus) are controlled by Appearance > Menus in the WordPress dashboard. This is an admin-only area.
Two important things to know about menus:
- Adding a page to WordPress does NOT automatically add it to the menu. A new page is invisible to visitors until it’s manually added to a menu.
- Editors should not change menus. Moving or removing menu items affects every visitor’s ability to navigate the site.
Page Templates
A page template controls the overall wrapper around your content — things like which header style is used, whether there’s a sidebar, and how the footer looks. BeaverBuilder controls only the content area inside that template.
Editors cannot change which template a page uses. If you think a page needs a different template, contact your web admin.
Parent and Child Pages
WordPress pages can be organized in a hierarchy. A parent page is like a folder, and child pages are the pages inside it. This affects the URL:
- Parent page:
/coaches/ - Child page:
/coaches/head-coach/
Editors should not change the parent assignment of any page. Changing the parent changes the URL, which can break links and menus.
The Bottom Line
Your role as an editor is to manage the content inside pages — not the structure around them. Menus, templates, and page hierarchy are admin territory. When in doubt, ask before you change anything structural.
