According to my personal observation, sidebars are still one of the best places to show ads and recent posts, especially if it is sticky.
Sidebar gets higher CPC compared to other places. It grabs people’s attention quickly, so it becomes a good place to show affiliate ads as well.
But according to some bloggers, sidebars don’t have any future. They think that sidebars are dead.
You may have noticed that new themes aren’t containing any space for sidebars. But why?
Some bloggers say that sidebars are not good if you want to collect leads, they think that sidebars distract users from reading their content, which results in fewer leads.
So if your main aim is to collect as much lead as you can, then staying on a theme that doesn’t have sidebars might be a good option.
I know you want to show sidebars on your blog and that is the reason why you’re here. Don’t worry, I have some of the most effective ways to show sidebars on your blog.
Let’s begin!
1. Change the theme
Maybe your current theme doesn’t have any space for sidebars. It is rare but it might be true. If you’re using the default WordPress theme (2019, 2020, and 2022), you should consider changing it because you won’t get any option to add a side widget in that.
Change the theme. There are thousands of free and paid themes available online, most of them provide an option to add a sidebar.
Choose a theme that suits your niche and have a sidebar option. Make sure to select a theme that is lightweight because heavy themes can impact your SEO negatively, they load slow and give poor experience to the users which won’t be your site for your site.
How to check whether the theme has sidebars or not?
To check the sidebar option, you need to go to the customization of the theme, and then click on Widgets. If you don’t see the Sidebar option there, that indicates that the theme doesn’t have any.
As you can see, when I checked it in twentytwentyone theme, I didn’t get any option to add Sidebars.
How to find free themes that have sidebars
As I said, there are thousands of themes that can give you a side space to shows ads and promotional posts. It is really easy to find them, just follow the steps below.
- Step 1: Go to the Appearance and click Add New
Log in to your WordPress dashboard, select or hover over Appearance from the menu and click Themes.
In the Themes section, you’ll see the themes that you have on your site right now.
- Step 2: Click Add New
Now, click on Add New to go to the WordPress themes zone.
- Step 3: Click on Feature Filter
This feature will help us filter out themes that don’t have sidebars.
- Step 4: Under Layout, select both Right and Left Sidebar
Click Apply Filter once it is done.
You’ll hundreds of themes, install any of them, they all will have sidebars. Play with that filter option to find a better theme for your site.
2. Change the post layout settings
Maybe your theme does have a sidebar space but some wrong settings are preventing it from displaying to the users. Well, it is quite simple to fix.
There are two ways you can follow, completely changing the post settings from the customization or enabling “show Sidebar” in the post layout setting.
If you want to show sidebars in all of your posts, then you should follow option one which is changing the post settings from customization.
Enable Sidebars from Theme Customization
Get logged in to your WordPress, and follow the instructions given below.
Note: Steps might be a little different for different themes. I’ve used the Blocksy theme for steps and screenshots.
- Step 1: Click on Customize
Once you’re logged in, click on Visit Site, and then Customize.
- Step 2: Select Single Post
Customization menu will appear, under Blog Posts, click Single Post.
- Step 3: Select Layout in Post Structure
Now, you’ll see multiple layouts, select the one which has sidebars. In the screenshot below, you can see, I have selected the Right Sidebar layout. So, all my blog posts will load with the right sidebar.
Click Publish after selecting the layout.
Change post layout from post layout settings
If only one post or page is not showing the sidebar, then it is might be because of layout settings. You may have changed the layout settings by mistake.
Now let’s see how to fix it. Again, the steps might be different if you’re using a different theme. But, the process is similar.
- Step 1: Select the post and click Edit
Select the post that isn’t showing the sidebar. Click Edit from the top. Or, simply go to posts, and then select the post you wanna Edit.
- Step 2: Click on the Theme Post/Page Setting
Click on the Theme Setting Icon present at the top right.
Note: Some of you may find this setting below the post.
- Step 3: Select the Layout
Now, select the Layout that you like. I’ve selected the layout that is giving a right sidebar option to me.
Once you’ve chosen the Layout, simply click the Update button to save everything you’ve done.
In case, you’re unable to find the layout customization option in your theme, then contact the theme developer. Go to their website, and visit their contact us page. Explain to them that you want a SIdebar on your blog, but you are not getting any option to show it.
They’ll help you. If they don’t then replace the theme.
3. Maybe The Sidebar is Missing Widgets
This solution might look pretty dumb, but this might be possible. If you don’t add any widgets in your sidebar, you’ll see a blank space in the sidebar section.
Adding widgets to the sidebar is simple. Here is how to add widgets in Sidebars.
To add a widget, log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets. Click on Add next to each widget you wish to add to your sidebar.
Once you have added all widgets, click on Save Changes under the sidebar on the right.
4. Fix Theme’s Stylesheet
According to techopedia.com, A style sheet is a file or form that is utilized in word processing and desktop publishing to determine the layout style of a document. A style sheet holds the specifications of a document’s layout, such as the page size, margins, fonts, and font sizes.
In current word processors such as Microsoft Word, a style sheet is known as a template. The most well-known structure of the style sheet is the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), which is utilized for styling Web pages.
If the code is incorrect in the stylesheet, sidebars won’t show.
To edit your theme’s stylesheet. You need to visit Appearance > Theme File Editor.
Scroll down and click Stylesheet under Styles.
You should see code that looks something like this:
.sidebarHere’s the code for Twenty Sixteen WordPress theme:
.sidebar {
float: left;
margin-left: 75%;
padding: 0;
width: 25%;
}Just one improper tag, such as an extra <div> or a misplaced close tag can make the content span too far across the page that it causes the sidebar to disappear.
Below is an error example.
.sidebar {
float: right;
margin-left: -100%;
max-width: 413px;
position: relative;
width: 29.4118%;It should look like this:
.sidebar {>
float: left;
margin-right: -100%;
max-width: 413px;
position: relative;
width: 29.4118%;
}How to add Sidebars to your themes
To successfully add the new sidebar to WordPress or create a custom sidebar in WordPress, you need to follow the steps shown below:
- Before you begin, create a backup copy of your WordPress theme because it involves risk
- Create a child theme from your parent WordPress theme and the child theme should contain the functions.php file
- Inside this functions.php file of your child theme, you will utilize the register_sidebar() function to make the sidebar.
- Create the sidebar.php file and add the dynamic_sidebar() function to this file with the name of the sidebar like this – dynamic_sidebar( ‘sidebar-1’ ) where sidebar-1 is the id of the sidebar you added when registering the sidebar.
- In your theme template files, you can now reach the sidebar using the get_sidebar() template tag.
- If you have completed a custom sidebar you can use the dynamic_sidebar() function to show the custom sidebar.
if you wanna know more about how to build a sidebar by coding, read the tutorial by njengah.com
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