How to Improve Your WordPress Sidebar?

A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or anywhere in the theme.

Why Should You Improve Your WordPress Sidebar?

The sidebar of your WordPress site is a crucial part that needs optimization with care. When used properly, it can help you get double or more email subscribers, page views, sales, etc.

In the WordPress sidebar, you can certainly add whichever widget you like to achieve your purposes, for example, displaying ads to make money, showing recent posts to generate traffic, and displaying a search box to improve site search. Also, you are able to use as many widgets as you like and arrange them in the way you want.

What is a Good WordPress Sidebar?

While there are no official rules for what a WordPress sidebar should look like, there are a few design concepts you can keep in mind while designing yours:

l  Keep it minimal. Long sidebars look unwieldy and weigh down the page. No one wants to scroll through a sidebar that’s the length of the page! By trimming down your sidebar to the essentials, you’ll have a much better looking and functioning page.

l  Include the essentials. You want to trim down your sidebar to the essentials, but what’s essential? There are no hard and fast rules, but generally, it’s good to include a short bio, a search bar, and contact information.

l  Accomplish your goals. The sidebar is prime real estate that helps you accomplish your goals. Is your aim to get the reader to join your email list? Use a signup form widget. Do you want the reader to be able to donate to you through PayPal? Throw a donation button at the top of your sidebar.

l  Connect with readers. Sidebars provide an ideal way to concisely communicate your site’s mission to the reader. You can use a short bio to tell the reader what you do, and you can include your contact information (social media network profiles, email, etc.) so readers can instantly connect with you.

Learn the Most Popular Usages of WordPress Sidebar

If you are uncertain about what to display in your sidebar or planning to add some more widgets, you can learn the popular usages first, and then select the ones that suit your need. Below are some of the widgets that you probably also want to take advantage of.

#1.Email subscription

If you are careful, you should have found that many popular blogs have put a subscription form in the sidebar to enable their users to receive updates easily. Such a form helps a lot in building a healthy email list and carrying out an email marketing campaign.

#2.Search box

Enabling the search function on your site is important because it contributes much to the user experience. Through the searches, also, more page views are generated. Such a search box is usually displayed near the top of the sidebar. To add one to your WordPress site, use a search plugin or integrate Google Custom Search.

#3.Showcase your content

WordPress sites come with a built-in recent posts widget. This widget does not perform very well. The reason is simple, your recent posts may not always be the best content to describe your site to a new user. You should use a popular posts plugin to display your most popular content. You can also combine it with a related posts plugin to showcase the most relevant content to new users.

#4.Social icons

Going social builds your credibility, promotes your site, and increases the interactions between your users and the site. This is why so many bloggers choose to display several social sharing icons at a prominent position of the sidebar. If you have built up profiles on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, you can do this, too.

#5.Ads

In the case that you are promoting or selling services, you can display ads in the sidebar to gain more revenue easily. However, when doing so, you must pay attention to the design and size of the ads to make sure they fit in the site design and do not upset your readers.

WordPress Sidebar Tips to Get Maximum Results

Tip 1. Choose Your Side Carefully

We commonly see sidebars situated on the right side of the page, but this isn’t always the best option. In fact, studies have shown that the average user tends to focus more on the left side of the screen than the right.

This is particularly true when using very large and wide monitors. Therefore, it’s easy to see that people will be more likely to check out the sidebar and interact with it when it is positioned on the left. We can’t guarantee that a switch from right to left will boost your popularity, but it’s certainly worth a try.

Tip 2. User Engagement Tools

Recent comments, polls and surveys, user rankings, points system, are just some of the ways to boost user engagement on your WordPress site. Displaying them in your sidebar helps boost user engagement on your website. This increases your pageviews and time each person spends on your site.

Tip 3. Add an Archives Widget

Admittedly, very few bloggers understand the full potential of an archives widget. Firstly (and obviously), this widget displays your posts based on time of publication, typically month and year.  Thus, your readers will find it easier to navigate to posts of a particular month. And if you have nofollow links in your sidebar, it may slightly improve your blog’s PageRank as all the link juice is passed to your posts.

WordPress comes with an archive widget out of the box, but there are many brilliant plugins that extend the basic functionality. Using appropriate customizations, you can ensure that the widget doesn’t go back too far but still includes important periods of time you want to highlight.

Tip 4. Use Images

Images are much more engaging than plain text. If you want to grab user’s attention, then use images as banners and buttons. You can link those banners and call to actions to different areas of your website.

You can simply upload an image using the media uploader and add the HTML code to display the image in a text widget. If you are not familiar with HTML, then you can use an image widget to add images in your WordPress sidebar.

Tip 5. Floating Sidebar Widget

Usually the content column of your website becomes a bit lengthier than your sidebar. This means that when users scroll down, there is nothing to look at in the sidebar column.

You can add sticky floating sidebar widgets to make sure that there is always a call to action visible to your readers as they scroll down.

Remember, the main purpose of a blog on your website is to increase visibility of the website so that it is found by Internet users. Optimizing your sidebar is just one way to make it easier for users to find your blog. Your sidebar should have a specific purpose. Avoid clutter and banner ads and you should be just fine.

Beginners' Guide: Don't Make 10 Common WordPress Mistakes

Blogging is a process of learning, everyone learns from previous mistakes. In the case of WordPress, the primary focus of a novice is to set everything up and get things running as soon as possible. In this hurry, there are quite a few things that are ignored which may lead to numerous security vulnerabilities and affect your blog/site in the long run. In this article, I’ve outlined 10 of the most common WordPress mistakes that almost every one of us makes in the beginning.

Hopefully, everyone will use this guide to avoid the same blunders and make their WordPress site better, faster and more secure and of course a success.

Installing WordPress Themes/Plugins from a Bad Source

There are plenty of websites available that provide free download links to premium themes and plugins. The important question is that, Why would someone out there will give you a premium or paid stuff for free of cost. The answer is simple, they are using your site as their income source. 

To avoid this common WordPress mistake, if you cannot afford a premium theme, you can choose a free theme from a well-known source like WooThemes.

No Backing up WordPress Files

You can’t predict when will a hacker attack your blog. If someone hacks your blog you will loose everything. If you are regularly taking the full backup of your site, even if someone attacks, you can restore your files without losing any data. 

So it’s important to have a recent backup of your website. You should backup the WordPress files and WordPress database. You should also make sure the database backup is not corrupt, which can occur. There are a variety of plugins which work – some free and others paid. I recommend trying out UpdraftPlus or BackupBuddy. These plugins backup your site on a regular basis, allowing you to keep attention focused on more important things.

Using “Admin” as Your User Login

When WordPress is installed, an administrator is required to control the site. It allows site owners to get WordPress up and running without dealing with database creation and sending files over FTP. The issue with some of these quick install programs is they don’t allow users to change the default WordPress administrator username during the installation, it’s just “admin.” The “admin” username is a hacker’s paradise. It’s the default, so if they want to try and hack into your site, they only need to guess your password.

No doubt, you need to change it immediately. There are a number of ways to do it, but the easiest is to just create a new user, delete the admin username and re-attribute posts to your new name.

Ignoring WordPress Updates

It is necessary to keep WordPress version, plugins and theme up to date. The version of WordPress updates in a regular manner to make it more user-friendly, secure and powerful. With the update of WordPress version, developers also update their plugins and themes to overcome the compatibility issues. Failing to update these keeps you away from using new features added by WordPress and eventually making it harder to use and vulnerable enough to attacked by hackers.

Action step: Always keep your site up-to-date by installing the latest updates. Just make sure to back it up before you do!

Lack of Site Security

With so many blogs and sites running on WordPress, you can imagine how many are hacked on a daily basis. WordPress itself is relatively secure, but when you add plugins to your site, your site’s security is compromised. Plugins are great, but not everyone is coded properly or secure, unfortunately.

So use a plugin to lock down your login page and/or create a lock down wall to increase the security of your site and lessen the chances of it getting hacked.

Not Setting Up The Permalinks

A permalink is a permanent static hyperlink to a specific blog post in your WordPress blog. You would probably have noticed that WordPress default permalink structure is something like www.yoursite.com/?p=123. Not only does this look awkward, but also bad for SEO and users.

A user and search-engine friendly permalink structure doesn’t only help you get ranked higher in search engines, but also shows your professionalism to your readers. After you’ve installed WordPress, never forget to make changes to your permalinks structure, by going under Settings » Permalinks. To get the most out of your SEO efforts, use appropriate keywords in your permalink structure.

Ignoring Image Optimization

One of the worst mistakes we all make is often forgetting to optimize images, while publishing an article. Especially, beginners don’t care at all about it. If you want to make your WordPress site load faster, then make image optimization your first priority.

Using HD images can have a tremendous impact on your site speed, while optimized images can improve the overall performance of your site in a dramatic way. So don’t forget to optimize images before uploading them to your WordPress site.

Using Too Many Plugins

When using a plugin, you should make sure you need it. There is no definite amount of how many plugins WordPress can handle, but just because a WordPress plugin is available, doesn’t mean you need it. Often website owners use too many plugins that are poorly coded leaving their website slow or because they have too many plugins installed, they have a hard time keeping them all up-to-date, which leads to an insecure WordPress installation.

Using The Default Favicon

The Favicon is considered as the identity card of your website. It’s a little icon associated with your site, typically displayed in the browser’s address bar or next to the site name in a list of bookmarks. Mostly WordPress newbies ignore their favicons, so their blogs/sites usually have favicons displayed by WordPress as default, or provided by their Theme Company or Web Hosting Provider.

To look more professional, you really need to change your favicon right now if you haven’t already. You can either make a favicon by yourself, or create one using one of the free favicon generators available around the web. Once you’ve generated your favicon, you need to upload it in the images section of your theme in order to replace the default one.

No XML Sitemap

Sitemap is basically a list of contents & their links in XML format which tells the Google or other search engine bots about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the website. It is necessary for faster indexing of your posts and pages. Not providing an XML sitemap is another mistake done by newbies. There are plenty of plugins for generating an XML sitemap for you. You may use the sitemap feature of  WordPress SEO by Yoast or Google XML Sitemap plugin.