How to Remove a Sidebar in WordPress: A Beginner’s Guide

The sidebar in WordPress is a pretty convenient way of presenting certain items. Without breaking the flow of the content, you can a lot of interesting content to your visitors. A sidebar can be used to make navigation more convenient, provide useful widgets and even to show advertisement without being intrusive. As useful as it is, however, there are some cases where one might want to remove the sidebar altogether. If you are one of those people wondering how to remove a sidebar in WordPress then you’re in luck. In this article, we are going to go through two different methods of doing so. Before that, let us take a look at the reasons why one might want to remove their sidebar.

Why Remove the Sidebar?

• The sidebar can be a constant distraction for your visitors as they go through your page.
• A sidebar can also make your web page look more cluttered. It can be an important issue for those who are trying to go for a minimalist aesthetic.
• Sidebars often translate poorly to mobile devices.
• In many cases, the sidebar is filled with redundant content that can be accessed from somewhere else on the website.

As you can see, removing the sidebar can be understandable in certain cases. So without further ado, let’s get into how to remove them.

How to Remove a Sidebar in WordPress?

1. Deleting Widgets

This method is actually quite easy. Firstly, go to Appearance>>Widgets from your Dashboard. Under the Sidebar panel, you can see a number of widgets that are supposed to appear on your sidebar. All you need to do is delete each and every one of them. Just click on the small triangle to bring down additional information about the widget and then click on the delete button.

Once you’ve deleted them all, your sidebar will no longer appear on your WordPress site. The downside of this method is that that the sidebar will be removed on all pages, without exceptions.

2. Changing the layout

Another method is to use a theme with layout options that include a layout without the sidebar. There are many themes that allow you to do that but for this tutorial, we will be using the Zakra theme. This feature-rich and versatile theme has a number of different layout options that can be changed with ease. Using this theme, you can remove WordPress sidebar only on certain parts of your website. To proceed, you will need the install the WordPress theme.

Once you’re done installing and setting up the theme, go to Appearance>>Customize. From here, go to Theme Options>>Layout>>General. You can set the default layout as well as the layout for Blog/Archive, Single Posts, Pages, and more. Just select one of the three layouts without a sidebar for the different parts of your website and click on Publish.

For Comparison

Let us take the example of this web page which has a sidebar on the right. As you can see the various items on the sidebar have taken up a significant amount of space on the right side of the screen. As a result, the actual content has lesser space to work with. You can even see that the image on the left has become hard to parse as a result. On the whole, it feels more congested.

In comparison, this is how the page looks once the sidebar has been removed. Since there are no widgets to take up the space, the actual content of the website gets the complete focus. The image is much more clear here, and the distractions are now gone. While it might not necessarily be better on all sites, we can see that removing the sidebar has been an improvement in this particular case.

To Conclude:

And there you go. Now you should know how to remove a sidebar in WordPress without any problems. Regardless of the method you picked, you can do it in no time at all. It is very easy to do and can provide much more space to the content on your posts and pages. If you aren’t sure about removing your sidebar entirely then there are a few ways you can spice it up. By adding a widget, you can use your sidebar to show some useful and fitting content. You can display an image widget, videos, random posts, Facebook Fanbox, or even a weather widget. For additional info, you can take a look at our article on how to install WordPress widgets.

If you have any comments, feel free to let us know in the comment section below. Your feedback is always appreciated. For more informative articles on WordPress, check out the links below.

• What is WordPress IFrame and How to Embed IFrame in WordPress?
• How to exclude Category Posts from Blog page on WordPress?
• How to Disable Comments in WordPress – A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners