Would you like to have a unique sidebar on your WordPress website that you can place different content inside? Kori Ashton from WebTegrity teaches you how to install a plugin that will do just that for you – Custom Sidebars.
Full Video Transcript
Hey y’all, this is another WordPress Wednesday. Every single Wednesday I’m releasing a new video to help you improve your online marketing. Specifically around the world of WordPress. My name is Kori Ashton from WebTegrity in San Antonio, Texas.
Today’s topic is all about how to add a custom sidebar on the right or left side of your website. Depending on where your author has allowed you to have a sidebar. Maybe you want to be able to put certain content from page to page in that sidebar, and your author wasn’t generous enough to give you a unique sidebar on every single page. In other words, every page has the same sidebar.
Let’s go over here to “About Us”. See how it has “Recent Posts”, and “Archives” and “Meta”. Of course, we can change anything that’s in this sidebar; but, what if on our “Contact” page, we didn’t want that same sidebar?
Maybe we wanted our Google Map or maybe we wanted to move our phone number really large over there. Or, maybe we even wanted to have a testimonial sitting in that space. How do we do that?
There is a plugin for that. Here we go.
I want you to go into your Dashboard and go to Plugins and click “Add New”. Of course, if you do not have the option to add a new plugin, or if you don’t even see plugins over here, you’re probably is the dot com version of WordPress. We are talking about the self-hosted version of WordPress, which is dot org. That’s the only way you’re gonna be able to do this.
So, we’re gonna look up “Custom Sidebar” and it’s free plugin, which is always in the budget, right? Free is always in the budget.
This is the one you’re looking for, right here. It says “Custom Sidebars”.
It has over 200,000 active installs and it has been updated recently. It’s not updated to the point that it’s ready to run with my version; but, that’s okay. What I want you to always think about when you’re looking at plugins is: Does it have a lot of installs? So, it’s not brand new and we’re gonna be it’s guinea pig. Does it have great reviews? If it does, you can have confidence to install that plugin and use it.
Now, we’re going to activate it, after it’s been installed. Now, we can go into appearance and go to “Widgets” and now we’ve got this really cool screen that we can create a new sidebar. I’m gonna just title it “Contact Page”; because, I’ll always remember now that stuff I put in here goes in the Contact sidebar.
(typing)
“Sidebar for contact page”
“Contact us page”
Okay, click “Create Sidebar”.
Now, it gives me a new box here that I can drag and drop anything I want to inside of. So, I’m just gonna grab a text box for now and say “cool stuff here”. We’re also gonna put “This is where a map could go” and click “Save”. All that did was create a sidebar and put a little bit of content in it.
Now, what we need to do is to go to the actual page and ask the page to render this particular sidebar that we’ve just created.
So, I’m gonna go back to “Contact Us” and I’m going to click “Edit Page”. Now, inside this page, you can scroll down on the right side and see “Sidebars”. We are replacing the pages “Sidebar” with one called “Contact Us”; because, that’s what we just made.
So, once we’ve told it which sidebar to display we can go back to the front side of the website and the “About Us” page will still have that one long default sidebar; but, our “Contact” page will have it’s own unique sidebar happening over here.
Of course, you can do that page to page to page. Different posts. Whatever you want to do. That’s how you do a custom sidebar inside of your WordPress website. I hope that helps.
Hey, if you have questions, we’ve got something new going on over at WebTegrity’s website. I want to show you this just briefly.
If you go into “Classes and Training” we’ve got an area now that you can come and basically book some time with me, if you have questions. You can come down to this section and book some time to just chat with me on a web call just like this. If you have questions specifically about WordPress development.
Maybe there’s a fix in your theme you need some help with, please reach out to us. We’d love to be your team of nerds over here at WebTegrity.
Hope you’re having a great day. See you all next WordPress Wednesday. By, y’all.
Did we mention it’s a Free plugin! That’s always in the budget!
Request a call with Kori –
https://webtegrity.wpengine.com/web-design-and-seo-classes-in-san-antonio/#call
Custom Sidebar WordPress Plugin-
https://wordpress.org/plugins/custom-sidebars/
Here’s the theme we were using for this video tutorial – Olsen Light
https://www.cssigniter.com/ignite/themes/olsen-light/
