Touch Menu is a small jQuery plugin that turns a standard website navigation into a scrollable, touch-friendly menu that stays visible on phones and tablets instead of collapsing into a hamburger button. It is built for site owners and freelancers who want a long navigation list — many links, deep categories, or multi-level sections — to remain usable on small screens without hiding everything behind an icon. At $6 on ThemeForest, it sits in the low-cost utility bracket rather than the premium plugin market.
What the Touch Menu javascript plugin actually does differently
The core idea is simple and worth stating plainly: most responsive menus shrink to a single button on narrow screens, and the visitor has to tap to reveal the links. Touch Menu takes the opposite route. The menu stays on screen and becomes scrollable, so every item is reachable by swiping rather than by opening a panel first.
That single design decision drives most of the plugin’s value:
- Unlimited menu items. Because the list scrolls, there is no practical ceiling on how many links can sit in the navigation. Sites with large product catalogues, documentation indexes, or location lists can expose everything without trimming the menu to fit a fixed height.
- No collapse-to-button behaviour. The menu does not disappear behind a toggle on small viewports. Visitors see the navigation immediately on load, which removes one tap from the path to any page.
- Touch-oriented interaction. The plugin is built around touch input rather than mouse hover, which matters on phones and tablets where hover states either do not exist or behave unpredictably.
- Cross-browser and cross-platform support. The vendor states it works on both iOS and Android as well as in desktop browsers. For a freelancer shipping to clients with mixed device audiences, that reduces the amount of manual device testing needed before handover.
- Multiple bundled themes. The package includes more than one visual theme, so the menu can be styled to sit alongside an existing design without writing CSS from scratch. The vendor does not state how many themes are included or what they look like.
Under the hood it is a jQuery plugin, which is worth flagging early. jQuery is still present on a very large share of WordPress and classic PHP sites, so for many projects this is a zero-friction dependency. On a modern stack that has deliberately moved away from jQuery, it is an extra library to load.
Where a scrollable Touch Menu javascript navigation fits — and where it does not
The clearest fit is a site with a genuinely long navigation list. A restaurant chain listing twenty locations, a wholesaler with a deep category tree, a university site with dozens of departmental links — these are the cases where a hamburger menu forces visitors into repeated open-and-close cycles. A persistent scrollable menu keeps every destination one swipe away.
It also suits mobile-first projects where the phone experience is the primary design target rather than an afterthought. If a client’s traffic is predominantly mobile and the brief calls for navigation that is always visible, this plugin’s default behaviour matches that brief without custom development.
Freelancers building small brochure sites or landing pages on a budget will find the price point easy to justify, and agencies can reuse a single licence across client work subject to the marketplace’s standard licensing terms.
There are situations where it is the wrong choice. If the site has only five or six navigation links, a scrollable menu solves a problem that does not exist, and a conventional compact menu will look cleaner. Equally, if the design brief explicitly calls for a slide-out drawer or a full-screen overlay menu — common in app-style interfaces — this plugin’s always-visible approach works against that pattern rather than supporting it.
Setting up Touch Menu in practice
Installation follows the usual pattern for a jQuery plugin. The site needs jQuery loaded first, then the plugin’s JavaScript and stylesheet files enqueued or linked in the page. The existing navigation markup is then initialised through a plugin call, and the bundled theme stylesheet is selected or overridden to match the site’s palette and typography.
For a WordPress site, that typically means adding the files through the theme, a child theme, or a small custom plugin, and hooking the initialisation into the footer after jQuery has loaded. For a static or custom-built site, it is a matter of adding the script tags and one initialisation line.
Realistically, a developer familiar with jQuery can have the menu running and styled in under an hour. Matching it precisely to an existing design — spacing, colours, active states, and how the scroll behaves inside a fixed header — is where the time goes, and that can run to a few hours on a design-sensitive project. The vendor’s listing does not document a settings panel or admin interface, so the assumption should be that customisation happens in code and CSS rather than through options in a dashboard.
Strengths and limitations of Touch Menu
Strengths
- Solves a real problem — long navigation lists on small screens — with a design decision rather than a workaround.
- No cap on menu items, so large site structures stay fully accessible on mobile.
- Removes the extra tap that hamburger menus impose on every navigation action.
- Stated compatibility with both iOS and Android covers the device split most sites actually see.
- Bundled themes reduce the styling work needed to get a presentable result.
- At $6, the cost is trivial relative to the development time it replaces.
Limitations
- It depends on jQuery. On a project built without jQuery, this adds a library purely for navigation.
- An always-visible menu consumes permanent screen space on small devices, which is a real trade-off against the screen real estate a collapsed menu preserves.
- The vendor does not state how many themes are included, what accessibility features the menu has, or whether keyboard and screen-reader navigation were tested. Buyers who need documented WCAG compliance should verify this before purchase.
- No sales figures are disclosed on the listing, so there is no public track record to weigh.
- Customisation appears to be code-and-CSS based; there is no indication of a visual settings interface.
How Touch Menu javascript compares with the wider menu plugin category
The general category here is responsive navigation plugins, and most of it is built around the collapse pattern: shrink the menu to a toggle, then reveal links in a drawer, dropdown, or overlay. Those plugins compete on animation quality, mega-menu support, and deep WordPress integration. Touch Menu competes on a different axis entirely — it refuses to collapse.
That makes the comparison less about features and more about fit. If the requirement is a polished mega-menu with hover panels and rich content inside each dropdown, a general-purpose menu builder will do more. If the requirement is simply that a long list of links stays reachable on a phone, Touch Menu addresses it with less configuration and a much smaller price.
Against free alternatives, the case rests on convenience. A developer can build a scrollable menu with a modest amount of CSS, so the $6 buys a packaged, cross-browser-tested starting point rather than capability that cannot be replicated. That is a fair trade for many freelancers and a questionable one for developers who prefer to own every line of their front-end code.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Touch Menu javascript and what does it do?
Touch Menu is a jQuery plugin that creates a responsive navigation menu which scrolls instead of collapsing into a button on small screens. It keeps every menu item visible and reachable by swiping, supports an unlimited number of links, and ships with several visual themes for styling.
Does Touch Menu work on both iPhone and Android?
Yes. The vendor states the plugin works on both iOS and Android as well as across desktop browsers. Because the menu is designed around touch input rather than hover, it behaves consistently on phones and tablets where hover states are unreliable or unavailable entirely.
Do I need jQuery to use Touch Menu?
Yes, jQuery is required. The plugin is written as a jQuery extension, so jQuery must be loaded on the page before the plugin’s script. Most WordPress themes and many classic sites already include jQuery, but sites built without it would need to add the library.
Is Touch Menu good for a WordPress site with many menu items?
It is a reasonable fit for WordPress sites with long navigation lists, because the scrollable design keeps every link accessible on mobile without trimming the menu. Integration requires enqueuing the plugin files in the theme and initialising it after jQuery loads, which is straightforward for anyone comfortable editing theme files.
Verdict: who should buy Touch Menu and who should skip it
Touch Menu is worth buying for freelancers and site owners running a site with a long navigation list who want that list fully usable on phones without building a custom solution. The low price, bundled themes, and stated iOS and Android support make it an easy decision for that specific case. It is a poor fit for sites with short menus, for projects that have removed jQuery, and for teams that need documented accessibility compliance the vendor does not currently provide. Agencies working on app-style interfaces with drawer or overlay menus should look elsewhere. For everyone in the middle, the deciding question is simply whether a permanently visible, scrollable menu matches the design brief.
