Easy hamburger menu with JS - Beginners

A hamburger menu is a classic UI feature present in countless websites. It's used to show and hide a menu on click, especially used in mobile design.

In this tutorial, we'll learn to create a hamburger menu with HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Here's the HTML:



<head>
  <!-- Material Icon CDN -->
  <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons" rel="stylesheet">
</head>
<body>
  <ul class="menu">
    <li><a class="menuItem" href="#">Home</a></li>
    <li><a class="menuItem" href="#">Profile</a></li>
    <li><a class="menuItem" href="#">About</a></li>
    <li><a class="menuItem" href="#">Contacts</a></li>
  </ul>
  <button class="hamburger">
    <!-- material icons https://material.io/resources/icons/ -->
    <i class="menuIcon material-icons">menu</i>
    <i class="closeIcon material-icons">close</i>
  </button>
</body>

Begin by adding a basic menu with a class of menu and menu links with a class of menuItem.

Then add a button with a class of hamburger and both a menu and a close icons inside of it. Later on we will hide the close icon by default with CSS and alternate which icon to show with Javascript.

You can use any icons family you want. I've used material icons by loading their CDN in the head and adding the menu and close icons inside of the button.

The menuIcon and closeIcon classes are used to reference the icons in CSS and Javascript later on.

Now let's add some CSS.

Add to the button position: fixed; so scrolling won't affect it. And z-index:100; to make sure it stays above every other element.

Add top and right with a value of 1rem to place it at the top-right corner of the screen.



.hamburger {
  position: fixed;
  z-index: 100;
  top: 1rem;
  right: 1rem;
  padding: 4px;
  border: black solid 1px;
  background: white;
  cursor: pointer;
}

To hide the close icon by default, add display: none; to the closeIcon class.


 css
.closeIcon {
  display: none;
}

In the menu class, add position: fixed; so it can't be scrolled away.

Set the top, right, bottom and left to 0 to make the menu cover the whole screen.



.menu {
  position: fixed;
  transform: translateY(-100%);
  transition: transform 0.2s;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  right: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  z-index: 99;
  background: black;
  color: white;
  list-style: none;
  padding-top: 4rem;
}

transform: translateY(-100%); is used to hide the menu by default above the screen.
transition: transform 0.2s; is optional. It is used to animate the change in translation value to create a slide up/down effect.

By resetting translateY to 0, the menu will slide down and cover the whole screen.

Add it in a showMenu class:



.showMenu {
  transform: translateY(0);
}

This class will be added and removed from the menu with Javascript to show and hide the menu.

Here's the Javascript for toggling the menu:


 javascript
const menu = document.querySelector(".menu");
const menuItems = document.querySelectorAll(".menuItem");
const hamburger= document.querySelector(".hamburger");
const closeIcon= document.querySelector(".closeIcon");
const menuIcon = document.querySelector(".menuIcon");

function toggleMenu() {
  if (menu.classList.contains("showMenu")) {
    menu.classList.remove("showMenu");
    closeIcon.style.display = "none";
    menuIcon.style.display = "block";
  } else {
    menu.classList.add("showMenu");
    closeIcon.style.display = "block";
    menuIcon.style.display = "none";
  }
}

hamburger.addEventListener("click", toggleMenu);

Clicking on the hamburger button will call toggleMenu().

It checks if the menu contains the class showMenu.

If the menu contains the showMenu class, we remove it to hide the menu. We also toggle the display to hide the close icon and show the menu icon.

If the menu doesn't have the showMenu class, we add it, show the close icon and hide the menu icon.

The hardest part is over! All that's left is to hide the menu when the user click on the links.

In the Javascript above, we got all the menu items with querySelectorAll.


 javascript
const menuItems = document.querySelectorAll(".menuItem");

With forEach, we can iterate through each link and add a call to toggleMenu().

toggleMenu() will in turn hide the menu (because if the user can click on the menu items it means that the menu is showing).



 javascript

menuItems.forEach( 

  function(menuItem) { 

    menuItem.addEventListener("click", toggleMenu);

  }

)

And that's it!

Thanks for reading 😄!!

(2nd rewrite 01/10/21)
I hope you've found it useful and happy coding 👨‍💻!

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Easy hamburger menu with JS - Beginners

ljc-dev

And that's it!

Thanks for reading 😄!!

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