How to Remove the Sidebar From Your WordPress Website
You have a fresh new WordPress install, and you’re dying to publish your work. You’ve got a beautiful, clean, semantic, and highly mobile-friendly design—all the right ingredients for a successful blog. You’ve customized your homepage with a big, bold, and beautiful block of content.
But wait! Before you publish that content and crush it, you want to test your site’s performance in terms of user experience. You’ve heard all the benefits of testing, and you’ve decided to fully employ that strategy on your latest project. You’ve installed a new plugin to test your site’s performance, and it’s been great so far. You’ve got a handful of users already, and the response from them has been great.
But wait again! As a human being, you’ve got an attention bug, and you can’t help but fidget while waiting for the page to load. It’s taking a while for your browser to connect with WordPress, and while it’s doing that, you feel like you’re wasting precious time. Time for the matter at hand. You’ve got an impatient bone in your body, and you can’t help but click on the back button on your browser to go back to what you were doing before. You feel like a child who needs their parent’s help, and in your situation, you need to call them for some peace and quiet. So you hit the back button, and you’re left with a slightly irritated mother waiting for her child to come back from the land of apps and games.
That’s when the sidebar comes in. You’ve got some great content to share, and you don’t want to keep it to yourself. So you decide to give the visitors what they want. You’ve got a sidebar, and instead of hiding it or removing it, you decide to see what all the fuss is about. You don’t want to break up the flow of the content, and you feel that the sidebar adds a little something extra to the experience. It draws attention to the content, and it helps the reader navigate through your content more easily. You can learn more about the pros and cons of having a sidebar on your site here.
The Challenge
So now you’ve got this great, big, beautiful, and bold block of content, and you want to give it the best shot at getting out there to the public. You don’t want to break up that flow by adding a sidebar, but you also don’t want to keep it hidden either. You’ve tried both options, and you don’t like either one. You want a way to remove that damn sidebar once and for all.
Does that sound familiar?
How to Remove the Sidebar From Your WordPress Website
Let’s take a look at how to remove the sidebar from your WordPress website. The process is actually pretty simple, but like all things involving WordPress, there are a few things you need to watch out for.
Remove Everything Incorrectly
This is the most basic and common mistake. When you first install WordPress, you’re given the option to initialize the theme you’ve chosen or create your own. If you create your own, you’ll have to go through all the templates and remove all the elements you don’t want, such as sidebars. Go through each template and make sure you’ve removed all the unnecessary elements. It’s easy to add them back later if you mess something up, but it’s much easier to go through the process and do it right the first time.
Start From the Back
When removing elements from your WordPress website, you need to start from the back. This is because everything is linked together, and if you remove something in the front, it will create complications further down the line. It’s often recommended that you begin your WordPress redesign with a fresh installation, so you don’t accidentally break something while trying to fix other things. If you decide to go through and remove all the elements of the template, you will end up with an empty blog with no content.
Check for Unnecessary Plugins
When you install WordPress, you’re given the option to select various plugins to enhance your site’s functionality. These are pieces of software that can enhance your site’s features and make things simpler for you. While there are many benefits to plugins, there are also a few that can clutter up your site. One of the biggest headaches that developers face when building WordPress sites is getting rid of all the plugins that the customer doesn’t need. This means you’ll have to search for plugins that enhance your site’s functionality and remove the ones that don’t.
Use A Content Management System
A good content management system, or CMS for short, takes the headache out of keeping track of all the little things that make up a WordPress website. One of the biggest headaches when using WordPress is keeping track of all the functions, plug-ins, and themes that you’ve used to build your site. Imagine trying to find all the instances where you used the red button on your laptop—the one that says “stop”—and putting it in a document to keep track of. That’s what a CMS does for you. It takes the guesswork out of the equation and keeps all the functionalities in one place, so you can always find them when you need them.
Ensure A Successful Redevelopment
If you decide to remove the sidebar from your WordPress website, you’ll need to be careful not to break anything along the way. There are many tutorials and videos available online that can guide you through the process of removing elements from your site without messing anything up. Simply follow the steps and ensure everything is done correctly. Having a successful redevelopment of your site is more important than anything else, so take the time to do it right the first time.
The Summary
So you’ve decided to remove the sidebar from your WordPress website. You’ve gone through the trouble of finding the correct template and removing all the elements you don’t want. You’ve used a CMS to easily keep track of all the changes you’ve made and ensure that everything is done correctly. Now it’s time to relax and enjoy your work. Your website’s functionality and look have improved, and you’ve made the right choice for your project.