Navigation Link Missing in SharePoint Site Settings

Created a site collection for the “Marketing” team today, and they came with a complaint: “I couldn’t see the Navigation link under site settings! As the ‘Navigation’ component gives more options, we need it badly! How do we get it?”, Alright, I went to Site Actions  >> Site Settings >> Look and Feel >> Nope! Couldn’t see the Navigation link. Yes, the Navigation link is missing!! Instead, I see “Quick Launch” and “Top Link Bar” links.

Cause:
The navigation link missing SharePoint 2010 because the site template is based on the “Team Site” template. Navigation links will be available on sites based on Publishing Site/Collaboration site templates, or a Navigation link will appear on the site collections with the publishing feature enabled. (If not, you’d see “Quick Links.”)

Solution:

Activate the “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” feature! Go to:

1. Site Actions >> Site Settings
2. Under the “Site collection administration” section, click on “site collection features”.
3. Activate the “Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” feature.
4. Now for each site, you can activate the feature “Office SharePoint Server Publishing”.
5. Done! You should be able to see the option “Navigation” under look and feel.

You can do it only if you are a site collection administrator.

Alright, don’t want to activate the publishing feature but want to access the Navigation component. The simple workaround for this issue is just to append /_layouts/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx to the URL. E.g. https://sharepoint.crescent.com/teams/marketing/_layouts/AreaNavigationSettings.aspx

Don’t want to activate the publishing feature but need the “Navigation” link under site settings? No issues. Here is the trick to getting Navigation link in site settings: Navigation is actually a hidden feature that gets activated when you activate the “Publishing Feature”. So, we can just activate the “Navigation” feature directly. This will fix navigation link missing for SharePoint 2007.

stsadm -o activatefeature -name “navigation” -url “https://sharepoint.crescent.com/sites/sales” -force

For SharePoint 2010 and later versions, you can enable the feature with PowerShell and get the navigation link:

Enable-SPFeature -Identity "navigation" -url "https://sharepoint.crescent.com/teams/marketing/"