How To Remove The Sidebar In WordPress? (Manually Or With Plugin)

Sometimes, due to reduced width in screen size, the sidebar can annoyingly appear at bottom of your website. If you know that your website visitors are predominantly on mobile devices, then it will be best if you remove sidebars from your site design. And so, we have prepared a quick guide to help you out with the topic.

Just know to always make a backup of your site before making any big chances. Luckily using the Customize (live preview) option on most themes you can see what you are changing before it actually happens. You can learn other tips and tricks to put content, sign up forms, or anything else you want in front of a customer on our other pages.

How To Remove Sidebar In WordPress?

Since the sidebar is a feature of your WordPress theme, you can remove it by simply switching to a sidebar-free theme.

However, in case you like your theme but just want to remove the sidebar, then head to your WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Theme Editor > Sidebar.php. This will open up the code for the sidebar used in the theme.

Type <!– at the start of the code and –> at the end, like shown in the image below. Once done, click on Update File and the sidebar area of your WordPress website will now be empty.

Now, for this tutorial to work, you do need to mess around with the core WordPress files. If you are new to the CMS (Content Management System) then we recommend that you follow our In-Depth step by step guide on the topic. Here we have laid out all the steps in comprehensive details to make it super easy for you to follow.

An In-Depth Guide On How To Remove Sidebar In WordPress

Sidebars are theme-specific features. For the purpose of this tutorial, we are using the Gratify WordPress theme. All steps discussed below will be the same for any other theme as well.

Step 1:

Login to your WordPress Dashboard, and head on over to Appearance > Theme Editor.

Step 2:

Here you will find the core code of the WordPress theme in use.

Use the righthand side menu to locate the Sidebar (Sidebar.php) file.

Step 3:

Now, in the display, you have the code for the sidebar of your WordPress theme. Type <!– at the start of all the code and –> at the end. These two lines signify that all the code in-between are comments and won’t be parsed by the browser.

Click on Update File, and now the sidebar has been removed from your WordPress website.

Note: The above steps will remove the sidebar and all its content but the space occupied by the sidebar will be left vacant.

Different Ways To Get Rid Of Sidebar Widget Without Deleting Code

Most themes have the option to change layout. So go to appearance => customize => layouts to see what you can do there. Sometimes you can just change the home page to a static page or blog roll. The full width option may be available and this will work as well.

From your posts page you can also sometimes get rid of the side bar in there by choosing different style of pages most have a landing page and archive page or what should be used is the “Full Width” template.

You can also go directly to the sidebar widget and delete any content out of there that will make the sidebar widget disappear too. Go to Appearance => Widgets => Sidebar Widget => Remove any widgets out of there.

Plugins To Edit And/Or Remove Sidebar

Widget Disable – This simple plugin allows you to disable any sidebar and dashboard widget for the current WordPress site you are on. It provides a simple user interface available to users with edit_theme_options capabilities (usually Administrator role) available under Appearance -> Disable Widgets.
After saving the settings, the sidebar and dashboard widgets are removed from and the user can’t see those widgets anymore.

Content Aware Sidebars – Unlimited Widget Areas  – 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.

Conclusion

The main purpose of a sidebar is to display things outside of the scope of the main page. It could be a number of things like a calendar, most recent post, most popular posts, sign up widget, ads, search bar, about the author, other pages, social networks, etc.

With mobile browsing taking over the internet and also Google there really is no need for a side bar at times or at least it shouldn’t be your main focal point.

When a person visits a website on their phone the sidebar will usually move to the bottom of the page which is fine. But if you put things in there that just don’t fit at the bottom of your page you might want to either remove or put something else there that will work from a phone.

There are ways to load your page differently for desktop and mobile but we won’t talk about that here. Removing your sidebar is very simply all you need to do is remove a piece of code, delete any widgets out of the sidebar area, or download a plugin that will perform this for you.

Removing the sidebar can be a great idea as you can implement strategies, tips, and tricks into your articles manually or using plugins as well. This will keep it more interactive with your users and get them signing up for your products or whatever you want them to do.