Many templates come with the pre-defined option to display a sidebar in the website/blog pages. The role of the sidebar is to show information that is not part of the main pages content.
However, you might want to hide the sidebar in the website pages, or simply remove it.
First, let’s see why it is so important to remove a sidebar from WordPress.
Here’s a list of the most common cases when you don’t want a sidebar to appear on your blog/website pages:
- You do not want to add separate sections of content and break the reading flow or distract users’ attention from the main content of the pages.
- One wants the blog pages to be clean, and have a neat look, so users can easily browse through the main content of the article.
- You want the blog post to occupy the entire space of the screen, for capturing full attention of your readers.
- You want to make use of precious space, that a sidebar occupies in the pages of the blog, not always efficiently.
- The full width layout is more appropriate for increasing engagement and conversions, on the website or blog.
- You simply don’t need widgets for your blog pages.
- You might want to temporarily remove the blog sidebar, and make tests to what blog design performs best, and gets more conversions.
Keep reading to see the methods you can use to remove the sidebar in your WordPress website.
Method 1: Delete all widgets and remove sidebar
The information contained in the sidebar is organized by widgets.
A WordPress widget is a small area that includes specific types of content. There might be a calendar, or the blog archive, recent comments or a list of your website pages, etc.
Here’s how the sidebar appears on a blog page:
You might want to remove this sidebar from your blog.
It can distract users from the main page content and you don’t want to break the reading flow.
All you have to do is go to the WordPress Admin dashboard and delete the widgets that are part of the sidebar.
- Navigate to “Appearance” -> “Widgets”.
You should find this section:
- You need to identify the sidebar that you don’t want to display in your pages.
In this case, it’s named “Sidebar widget area”, as shown in the above image.
- You should proceed to deleting every widget that is included in the Sidebar widget area.
For this doing, click on the widget section, to expand it.
You’ll see the “Delete” button at the bottom of the widget section, as shown in the image above.
Press “Delete” and that’s it. You have just removed the first widget from the sidebar.
You have to do the same with every widget that is part of the sidebar widget area. In this case, you should also remove “Archives” and “Recent Comments”. You’ll do this by pressing the “Delete” button corresponding to the respective sections.
You should see no more widgets next to the Sidebar Widget Area:
The result will be that the sidebar is no longer displayed in the blog pages:
The featured image and the blog content will occupy the entire space of the screen, as you can see in the above image.
Method 2: Make full width template, if the theme supports this feature
Another method you can use to remove the sidebar is to apply certain settings to your pages, from the WordPress Admin Dashboard.
It’s very easy to implement, provided you have a theme that supports this functionality.
The result will be that the page/post main content will display on the entire screen, and no sidebar will be placed on the page.
You need to login to your WordPress account. Enter the WordPress Admin Dashboard and select Pages or Posts to check the list of your website pages or your blog posts.
Select the page/post you want to remove the sidebar from.
In the right-hand options, scroll down to attributes.
You should find the options for Template, as indicated in the image below:
Use the drop-down menu and find the option to set the page to Full Width Template.
Select it and press “Update”.
The main content of the page will occupy the entire space of the screen, as you can see below:
Method 3: Add some extra lines of code to the source of the website pages
If method 2 doesn’t work, it means you’re using a theme that does not support the full width template.
But you still want to remove the sidebar from your website pages.
There’s an additional solution for such a case: edit the source code of the website.
However, it is not recommended that you edit directly the source code in your theme. It might break the website. We suggest you have a child theme and edit the source code for that child theme. For this step, please refer to this guide on creating child themes in WordPress.
Here’s how:
Login to your WordPress account and enter the Admin Dashboard in WordPress.
In the left-hand menu, go to Appearance -> Editor. You’ll find a screen that displays the following:
Find the Sidebar.php file and click on it.
The lines of code to be added to the Sidebar.php file will be as follows:
You need to edit this file and add some extra lines of code, to remove sidebar from your blog posts or website pages.
And to ensure the changes do not break the overall design, the code adjustments should concern commenting the code.
So, you’ll have to add the extra lines indicated below, and press “Update”:
The result will be deletion of the sidebar from your pages:
Method 4: Deactivate and remove sidebar with a plugin
This method supposes that you’ve been using a plugin for sidebars: Content Aware Sidebar.
With the help of Content Aware Sidebar, you created a sidebar and you set it to display on some or all of the website pages. But you no longer want the sidebar to appear on the pages.
Similarly to the first method, this one requires you identify the section destined to the sidebar you want to eliminate.
In the case below, we want to remove the sidebar including “Archives”, “Calendar” and “Recent Comments”.
Login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard.
Go to Appearance -> Widgets.
The sidebar section we want to apply changes to is named Sidebar for Test. It is marked with a blue line, as are all sidebars created with the Content Aware Sidebar.
You’ll find a green button corresponding to Sidebar for Test. This marks that the sidebar is active on pages.
To remove the sidebar from WordPress, you’ll have to deactivate Sidebar for Test, as you can see in the image below:
After having deactivated the sidebar, it’ll no longer display on the pages:
We hope you’ll find the method that works for you and manage to remove the sidebar from your WordPress website. Therefore, the website design will look neat and clean, and have a modern look that users will appreciate.
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