Menu not selecting since i added a drop down

Topic summary

A user encountered an issue where adding a dropdown menu to their navigation caused the parent ‘Products’ link to become unclickable in the Debut theme.

Root Cause:
The theme wasn’t using an anchor tag for the parent menu item when a dropdown was present, instead using a span element.

Solution Provided:

  • Edit site-nav.liquid in the Snippets folder (around line 27)
  • Replace the span element with an anchor tag wrapping the same code
  • This restored clickability to the parent link

Additional Customization:
The user also requested an animated underline effect on hover. Custom CSS was added to theme.css.liquid to create a centered, expanding underline animation. A minor adjustment removed the persistent underline on active pages.

Later Comments:
Several users noted this solution doesn’t apply to newer themes like Dawn (2023+), as theme structures differ significantly. For Dawn and other modern themes, different code modifications are required, with one user linking to a separate discussion thread addressing Dawn-specific navigation issues.

Summarized with AI on November 14. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-design/dawn-theme-navigation/m-p/1534872#M407028