Creating a Responsive Navbar Without Bootstrap16.07.21

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Aleksandr Hovhannisyan

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Creating a Responsive Navbar Without Bootstrap

May 10, 2020

14 min read
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Navigation bars (aka navbars) are everywhere on modern websites, so it's definitely good to know how to create one by hand without relying on a component library that does all of the heavy lifting for you. But if you've never created one from scratch, you may find it intimidating to get started.

For this reason, people often turn to CSS frameworks like Bootstrap to build navbars so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. Yet what usually ends up happening is that you get lost in a sea of obscure class names and behavior that's difficult to customize. You waste many frustrating hours on StackOverflow when instead you could've simply built the thing by hand in less time.

In this tutorial, we'll create a responsive navbar that works on both mobile and desktop, using nothing but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That's right—no CSS frameworks needed :) Let's dig in!
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Table of Contents

What We're Building
    Responsive Navbar HTML
    How Does It Work?
    Responsive Navbar CSS and JavaScript
        Navbar Hamburger Icon
        Toggling the Hamburger Icon
        Responsive Navbar Menu
    Responsive Navbar: Desktop Layout
    Alternative Responsive Navbar Designs
    Final Thoughts

What We're Building

Here's the codepen for this tutorial:

There's actually not a lot of HTML involved! Navbars aren't all that difficult to create once you go through the process yourself.

We'll design this with a mobile-first approach and simply take care of the desktop case with a media query. Note that I'm not designing with any minimum device width in mind, but this works all the way down to 320px, one of the narrowest mobile resolutions that you typically need to account for.

Note: I'll also offer alternative design options wherever it's possible with just a few changes. For example, if you don't like the detached/floating navigation menu, I'll show you how to keep it attached or get it to behave like a sidebar.

Responsive Navbar HTML

Below is all of the HTML that we're going to need to create our responsive navbar, complete with semantic and legible markup and none of that Bootstrap nonsense:
index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Responsive Navbar</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
    <header id="navbar">
        <nav class="navbar-container container">
          <a href="/" class="home-link">
            <div class="navbar-logo"></div>
            Website Name
          </a>
          <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" aria-label="Open navigation menu">
              <span class="icon-bar"></span>
              <span class="icon-bar"></span>
              <span class="icon-bar"></span>
          </button>
          <div class="navbar-menu">
            <ul class="navbar-links">
              <li class="navbar-item"><a class="navbar-link" href="/about">About</a></li>
              <li class="navbar-item"><a class="navbar-link" href="/blog">Blog</a></li>
              <li class="navbar-item"><a class="navbar-link" href="/careers">Careers</a></li>
              <li class="navbar-item"><a class="navbar-link" href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
            </ul>
          </div>
        </nav>
    </header>
    <script src="index.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

We're going to need two more files: style.css and index.js. Go ahead and create those before moving on. Note that you can place them under an assets folder if you'd like; just be sure to update the link and script in the above HTML to point to the correct files.
How Does It Work?

Before I vomit a bunch of CSS on your screen and leave you clueless as to what's going on, let's take a closer look at the components that make up our navbar.

First up, we're using a <header> landmark element with an ID of navbar as the outermost parent:

A header element

Inside of that is a nested <nav> landmark element, which signals the start of a navigation menu to screen readers and browsers. This container's main purpose is to align the left and right ends of our navbar with the page's left and right margins. This assumes that the page content itself is also wrapped with a .container for horizontal centering.

A nav landmark element with left and right padding and auto margins

As you may have probably guessed, this is a flex container. It has three children:

.home-link: Anchor wrapped around the website logo and name.
    .navbar-toggle: The hamburger button used to toggle the navigation menu on mobile devices.
    .navbar-menu: The navigation menu wrapper, containing a list of links to our pages.

Let's take a closer look at that last element:

The navbar-menu fixed wrapper

This wrapper is given a fixed position and covers the entire screen. It also has a semi-transparent background that elevates it visually above the main content of the page. In some UI libraries, this is known as a mask layer. It's a common approach used with things like modal windows and menus.

Within .navbar-menu is an unordered list with some padding, margins, and a box shadow:

The navbar-links unordered list element

And finally, that list houses the actual navigation links:

A navigation bar link being inspected in Chrome dev tools

That's it! When we hit the 700px breakpoint, our media query kicks in and styles the desktop navbar. This media query was determined based on the number of navbar links in this particular setup. If you have more content, you may wish to adjust this breakpoint.

With all of this prep work out of the way, we're ready to begin creating our responsive navbar.
Responsive Navbar CSS and JavaScript

We're going to take this slowly. I'll add explanations for each bit of CSS and JavaScript that I introduce so you understand what's going on. I'll also show screenshots with each major change we introduce.

First up are some standard CSS resets and base styling:
style.css

:root {
    --navbar-bg-color: hsl(0, 0%, 15%);
    --navbar-text-color: hsl(0, 0%, 85%);
    --navbar-text-color-focus: white;
    --navbar-bg-contrast: hsl(0, 0%, 25%);
}

* {
    box-sizing: border-box;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
}

body {
    height: 100vh;
    font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
    line-height: 1.6;
}

Feel free to remove any of the CSS that doesn't apply to your situation; this is just for the tutorial itself. The variables up at the top will help us avoid copy-pasting colors in our CSS. We reset paddings and margins and use box-sizing: border-box to ensure that widths/heights take border and padding into account. Finally, we ensure that the body takes up the entire vertical height of the device with height: 100vh.

Before we look at the CSS specific to the responsive navbar, I'd like to introduce one more selector:
style.css

.container {
    max-width: 1000px;
    padding-left: 1.4rem;
    padding-right: 1.4rem;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto;
}

This is a pretty popular approach for centering things horizontally in CSS. Basically, you can just slap a class name of container on anything that should be horizontally centered on the page. Here, the page is centered to a maximum width of 1000px. If you'll recall, we applied this class to the <nav> element:

Alright, time to actually style our responsive navbar. We'll work in a top-down fashion. First up is the outermost #navbar element:
style.css

#navbar {
    --navbar-height: 64px;
    position: fixed;
    height: var(--navbar-height);
    background-color: var(--navbar-bg-color);
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    box-shadow: 0 2px 4px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
}

Result:

Styled navbar header element

Why we need the CSS variable will become obvious later on. The entire element is given a fixed position so it sticks to the top of the page as the user scrolls. It's also given a slight box shadow. Don't worry about the fact that the links are currently overflowing their parent; we'll fix this soon enough.

Moving on, we have the nested container element:
style.css

.navbar-container {
    display: flex;
    justify-content: space-between;
    height: 100%;
    align-items: center;
}

Result:

Styled navbar-container element

As I mentioned earlier, this is simply a flex container. We use justify-content: space-between to position the home link and hamburger icon on opposite ends of the navbar. But right now, it's positioning all three children: the home link, the hamburger button, and the navigation links themselves; we'll fix this shortly.

Next up is some general styling for the navbar anchors:
style.css

.navbar-item {
    margin: 0.4em;
    width: 100%;
}

.home-link,
.navbar-link {
    color: var(--navbar-text-color);
    transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out;
    text-decoration: none;
    display: flex;
    font-weight: 400;
    align-items: center;
    transition: background-color 0.2s ease-in-out,
                color 0.2s ease-in-out;
}

.home-link:focus,
.home-link:hover {
    color: var(--navbar-text-color-focus);
}

.navbar-link {
    justify-content: center;
    width: 100%;
    padding: 0.4em 0.8em;
    border-radius: 5px;
}

.navbar-link:focus,
.navbar-link:hover {
    color: var(--navbar-text-color-focus);
    background-color: var(--navbar-bg-contrast);
}

Result:

Styled anchor elements

Pretty straightforward.

Here's the CSS for the website logo. Note that this is just a placeholder for my demo; in reality, you'll probably want to use an image or SVG:
style.css

.navbar-logo {
    background-color: var(--navbar-text-color-focus);
    border-radius: 50%;
    width: 30px;
    height: 30px;
    margin-right: 0.5em;
}

Result:

Styled logo

Time for the toggle button!
Navbar Hamburger Icon
style.css

.navbar-toggle {
    cursor: pointer;
    border: none;
    background-color: transparent;
    width: 40px;
    height: 40px;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
    flex-direction: column;
}

Basically, we reset some of the default <button> styles and give the button fixed dimensions. It's also a flex container. Note that the actual bars of the hamburger icon are three <span>s:

Note: I'm not using divs because it's invalid HTML to put divs inside buttons.

Here's the CSS for that:
style.css

.icon-bar {
    display: block;
    width: 25px;
    height: 4px;
    margin: 2px;
    transition: background-color 0.2s ease-in-out,
                transform 0.2s ease-in-out,
                opacity 0.2s ease-in-out;
    background-color: var(--navbar-text-color);
}

.navbar-toggle:focus .icon-bar,
.navbar-toggle:hover .icon-bar {
    background-color: var(--navbar-text-color-focus);
}

Result:

Styled hamburger button

There are lots of ways to do this, but I think this is the most straightforward to understand. I'm sure you can take advantage of pseudo-elements instead.

When the toggle button is clicked, we'll apply a class name of .opened to the navbar via JavaScript. Here's how we'll animate the hamburger icon to become a close icon (X):
style.css

#navbar.opened .navbar-toggle .icon-bar:first-child,
#navbar.opened .navbar-toggle .icon-bar:last-child {
    position: absolute;
    margin: 0;
    width: 30px;
}

#navbar.opened .navbar-toggle .icon-bar:first-child {
    transform: rotate(45deg);
}

#navbar.opened .navbar-toggle .icon-bar:nth-child(2) {
    opacity: 0;
}

#navbar.opened .navbar-toggle .icon-bar:last-child {
    transform: rotate(-45deg);
}

Basically, the middle bar disappears, the top and bottom bars get centered, the top bar rotates 45 degrees clockwise, and the bottom bar rotates 45 degrees counter-clockwise.
Toggling the Hamburger Icon

Now's a good time to code up the logic for toggling the navigation menu so we can test that the toggle button works:
index.js

const navbar = document.getElementById("navbar");
const navbarToggle = navbar.querySelector(".navbar-toggle");

function openMobileNavbar() {
  navbar.classList.add("opened");
  navbarToggle.setAttribute("aria-label", "Close navigation menu.");
}

function closeMobileNavbar() {
  navbar.classList.remove("opened");
  navbarToggle.setAttribute("aria-label", "Open navigation menu.");
}

navbarToggle.addEventListener("click", () => {
  if (navbar.classList.contains("opened")) {
    closeMobileNavbar();
  } else {
    openMobileNavbar();
  }
});

Now, I know what you're thinking:

"But Aleksandr, why not just use the checkbox hack and avoid writing JavaScript altogether?"

Because:

CSS is for styling. JavaScript is for interactivity.
    Hacks are called hacks for a reason. Use checkboxes for forms, not buttons.

We also take care of an accessibility issue here and apply a different aria-label depending on the current state of the button. If the navigation menu is open, the user's screen reader will indicate that clicking the button again will close the menu. And vice versa.

At this point, you can hop on over to your browser and test that the button works. But the menu is still not functional, so let's fix that.
Responsive Navbar Menu

As I mentioned earlier, the navigation menu wrapper has fixed positioning, with a top offset equal to precisely the height of the navbar itself:
style.css

.navbar-menu {
    position: fixed;
    top: var(--navbar-height);
    bottom: 0;
    transition: opacity 0.2s ease-in-out,
                visibility 0.2s ease-in-out;
    opacity: 0;
    visibility: hidden;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
}

Result:

Styled navbar-menu wrapper

While opacity: 0 and visibility: hidden may seem redundant, it's a good idea to animate both of these properties because visibility alone tends to snap/animate very rapidly, whereas opacity is more gradual.

Here's the code for the menu's opened state:
style.css

#navbar.opened .navbar-menu {
    background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);
    opacity: 1;
    visibility: visible;
}

Click the hamburger icon to see the following result:

Navigation menu in its opened state, with links visible below the navigation bar

The container for the navigation links is an unordered list:
style.css

.navbar-links {
    list-style-type: none;
    max-height: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
    position: absolute;
    background-color: var(--navbar-bg-color);
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: column;
    align-items: center;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    margin: 1.4rem;
    border-radius: 5px;
    box-shadow: 0 0 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
}

#navbar.opened .navbar-links {
    padding: 1em;
    max-height: none;
}

Result:

Styled navbar-links container

This is the actual, physical "menu" part of our navigation. The margin ensures that the menu appears detached from the rest of the navbar, as if it's floating on the page. If instead you'd like it to appear as a physical extension of the navigation bar, simply get rid of the margin and border radius and shift the shadow down:
style.css

.navbar-links {
    list-style-type: none;
    max-height: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
    position: absolute;
    left: 0;
    right: 0;
    background-color: var(--navbar-bg-color);
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: column;
    align-items: center;
    box-shadow: 0 20px 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
}

Result:

An attached navigation menu that's been opened

And that's it for the mobile version's CSS!

One last thing before we style the desktop version. Add this to your JavaScript:
index.js

const navbarMenu = navbar.querySelector(".navbar-menu");
const navbarLinksContainer = navbar.querySelector(".navbar-links");

navbarLinksContainer.addEventListener("click", (clickEvent) => {
  clickEvent.stopPropagation();
});

navbarMenu.addEventListener("click", closeMobileNavbar);

Basically, this lets the user close the navigation menu when they click on .navbar-menu. But we need to stop click propagation so that any clicks on .navbar-links don't bubble up and trigger a close.

Go ahead and test this on your end to make sure the mobile version works.
Responsive Navbar: Desktop Layout

I'll show the media query in its entirety and then we'll look at what each piece is doing:
style.css

@media screen and (min-width: 700px) {
    .navbar-toggle {
        display: none;
    }

#navbar .navbar-menu,
    #navbar.opened .navbar-menu {
        visibility: visible;
        opacity: 1;
        position: static;
        display: block;
        height: 100%;
    }

#navbar .navbar-links,
    #navbar.opened .navbar-links {
        margin: 0;
        padding: 0;
        box-shadow: none;
        position: static;
        flex-direction: row;
        list-style-type: none;
        max-height: max-content;
        width: 100%;
        height: 100%;
    }

#navbar .navbar-link:last-child {
        margin-right: 0;
    }
}

So first up is this:

.navbar-toggle {
    display: none;
}

Result:

Hamburger menu button hidden

We don't want the hamburger button to be visible on desktop, so we hide it with display: none.

Now we get to the most important part of making this navbar responsive:

#navbar .navbar-menu,
#navbar.opened .navbar-menu {
    visibility: visible;
    opacity: 1;
    position: static;
    display: block;
    height: 100%;
}

Whereas before the .navbar-menu wrapper was fixed in position, covering the entire screen, it's now static. This means it assumes its natural position in the DOM based on where it was defined in our HTML. In this case, that's after the home link (since the hamburger is now invisible).

And finally, .navbar-links now uses a flex direction of row instead of column, ensuring that the links appear side by side on the navbar:

#navbar .navbar-links,
#navbar.opened .navbar-links {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    box-shadow: none;
    position: static;
    flex-direction: row;
    list-style-type: none;
    max-height: max-content;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
}

Result:

Fully styled desktop version of the navbar

We're officially done! But you may be wondering if there's room for customization—there sure is!
Alternative Responsive Navbar Designs

For the purposes of this tutorial, I made lots of assumptions about the default state, appearance, and behavior of the navigation bar. In reality, what you'll want to do is use separate, specialized class names to customize this navbar to your liking.

Here's a codepen with options that you can toggle:

The CSS now involves these classes, which get applied to .navbar-menu:

detached: The default type of navigation menu.
    attached: The menu is an extension of the navigation bar.
    sidebar left: The menu opens as a sidebar from the left.
    sidebar right: The menu opens as a sidebar from the right.

Final Thoughts

Creating responsive navbars in HTML isn't really all that difficult once you master basic positioning and Flexbox, as those two account for a majority of the CSS. The rest is just there to space the content and make things look pretty.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful!
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