Multilevel dropdown menus are a staple of web design. With the ability to provide multiple options to select from, they make navigation bars dynamic and organized.

For any developer working in React or any React-based project like Gatsby or Next.js, this tutorial covers the step-by-step process of how to implement the dropdown feature in a React project. At the end of this guide, we will have the menu below:

Setting up the React project

Let’s start by creating a new React project called react-multilevel-dropdown-menu by running the following command:

npx create-react-app react-multilevel-dropdown-menu

Once the project generates, navigate inside the project folder using cd react-multilevel-dropdown-menu or simply open the project with a code editor.

The React project structure

Like every React project, we will decompose our project UI design into independent and reusable components as outlined below:

Creating the project files

Head over to the src folder and delete all the files except the index.js. Next, create a folder called components inside the src and add the following component files: App.js, Dropdown.js, MenuItems.js and Navbar.js.

Rendering top-level menu items

Let’s start building by rendering the top menu items. To do this, we must get the menu data by creating a menuItems.js file in the src folder and adding the following: