Advanced Portal Navigation not displaying in Employee Center Pro even after Sync Hierarchy

[Community Alums]

Hello everyone,

I am facing an issue with Advanced Portal Navigation in Employee Center Pro and would appreciate any guidance.

Issue:

The navigation menu is not displaying in the portal. The header bar loads, but the menu items are empty.

Environment:

• Portal: ESC(Employee Center Pro)

• Navigation style: Top

• Advanced Portal Navigation record: Active

• Menu items: 12 items configured

Details:

• The menu items are visible in the Advanced Portal Navigation → Menu Items related list.

• Sources include both Taxonomy and Service Portal Menu.

• The taxonomy used is Employee.

• Topics such as Information Technology, Facilities, Shared Services, Workplace Services are present.

Troubleshooting already performed:

1. Clicked Sync hierarchy in the Advanced Portal Navigation record.

2. Verified the navigation record is Active.

3. Confirmed taxonomy topics are active/published.

4. Cleared cache using:

   • cache.do

   • sp_cache.do

5. Tested by creating a new Advanced Portal Navigation, and it works correctly.

Observation:

The newly created Advanced Portal Navigation displays correctly in the portal, but the existing one does not render any menu items even though records exist.

Question:

Has anyone encountered a situation where an existing Advanced Portal Navigation stops rendering menu items while a newly created navigation works correctly?

Could this be related to taxonomy sync, portal configuration, or a known issue with Employee Center navigation?

Any suggestions or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

[Thao Nguyen1]

I'm also facing this Problem after upgrade Service Now Instance to Australia. I

I can no longer see or manage the menu item hierarchy in the Advanced Portal Navigation. This is quite confusing, as the functionality seems to have reverted back to the older behavior.

Currently, it seems that the only way to structure the navigation hierarchy is via:

Portals → Main Menu → Menu Items, where the hierarchy must be created directly within the menu items.

Afterall it is not really solving my problem cause I have positioning the menue item to left or right and this should works in Advanced Portal Navigation, but doesn't get it.

[JenR]

I'm still on Zurich but recently upgraded Employee experience taxonomy to the latest version 28.2.5 and I am having the same issue. Portal header mostly seems to ignore my APN configurations 😞

[michaelward]

Any resolution.  Also on Zurich, changes in the taxonomy (order, relabeling, reparenting) will not synch.

[CassianD]

Interesting that a new navigation works but the old one doesn’t — that usually points to some kind of corrupted record or stale config rather than taxonomy itself. I’d probably try duplicating the working one and gradually reusing pieces from the old config to see where it breaks.

[RWebring]

We are also running into a similar issue, although we arrived at this problem through a different route. This appears to have started after doing a round of plugin updates, which included Employee Center, Employee Center Core, among others - not sure if these were the culprit however.

Now our APN menu does not render if the position is set to Top. If it is set to Side it will render. Toggling back to Top has no effect, just a blank header bar. We have tried inactivating / reactivating, syncing hierarchy, toggling active on menu items, have done the usual log out / in, clearing cache for the browser, different browsers, etc... all to no effect.

We are currently on Zurich, using Employee Center (not pro version).