A sidebar is a valuable space on your website and it is the widget-ready area in your WordPress theme. Sidebars are extremely common in WordPress design.
Why you may want to remove the sidebar from the WordPress website.
Sidebars often appear at the right or left side or below the primary content area on every page. There is a pre-defined option to display a sidebar on the website/blog pages in many templates. But the sidebar isn’t helpful for every website experience. There may be instances where a sidebar may not be needed for your WordPress site. It all depends on the type of website you have, the design and the purpose of the sidebar.
Let’s look at the steps of how sidebars can be removed in WordPress:
1. Delete all widgets and then remove the sidebar
- In this step, first, go to Appearance>widgets
- In the sidebar widget area, Identify the sidebar which you don’t want to display
- For deleting widget in your sidebar widget area, click on the widget section and it expands.
- You can see a Delete button at the bottom of the widget section
- Press Delete and that’s it.
2. Remove Sidebar Using a Plugin
WordPress plugins make it simple to add features to your website. You can install a plugin to remove the sidebar on your website, too. Follow the steps below.
- Go to Plugins > Add New on the left side of your dashboard.
- Search for the Widget Disable plugin.
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Go to Appearance > Disable Widgets.
- Under the Sidebar Widgets tab, click Select all to disable the sidebar widgets from your website.
- Click Save Changes.
3. Remove Sidebar in FTP
You can remove the sidebar using an FTP client by editing the code in your theme. But in this case, it’s highly recommended that you backup your site just in case something goes wrong. Consider using a child theme, so you won’t be making permanent changes to the theme itself.
- Connect to your FTP.
- Open the folder: /wp-content/themes/your-current-theme/
- You should see all the template files. (For example, home.php, index.php, single.php, archive.php, and page.php)
- To remove the sidebar, delete this line of code from each template:
<? php get_sidebar ('sidebar-name'); ?>
- It’s possible that your WordPress theme has multiple sidebars. So, look for a similar code and delete it:
<?php get_sidebar('footer-widget-area'); ?>
- Click Save after you finish deleting all the code from each template.
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You can view the changes on your website now. If you’re using a caching plugin, be sure to deactivate it to see your changes. You can always reactivate the caching plugin later.
4. Removing Sidebar from Static Page
A static page is your customized page that doesn’t change when you add blog posts to your website. Most businesses use a static page as their homepage. In some cases, you may want to use a sidebar in some areas of your site but not others.
To remove your sidebar from a single static page – such as your Home, About, or Blog page – you’ll want to start by checking to see if your theme includes a full-width template
- Go to Pages on the left side of your dashboard.
- Select the desired static page.
- On the right-hand side, find Page Attributes.
- Under Template, select Full Width.
- Click the blue Publish or Update button.
