- Hey y'all, I'm Kori Ashton and it's another
WordPress Wednesday.
Today I'm going to be showing you how to add
a fixed sidebar into your website.
So let's say that you have your website
and it's a lot like mine where your pages and your posts
can have a whole lot of content running over here
then all of a sudden, your sidebar obviously
isn't as long as the rest of the content, right?
So you wonder, well, is that missed opportunity,
is that dead space, it just kinda looks weird.
But not every post, not every page,
is gonna be that same amount of content.
I'm gonna show you a fix for it right now.
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All right, let's look at the solution
I have for you guys because I have looked
at two different options to create a sticky
or fixed sidebar.
One of 'em is this solution here
called WP Sticky Sidebar and as of today, of course,
it is up to date with the current version,
4.9.8 of WordPress, so if you're looking
at this video later on down the road be sure
that it's tested with your current version of WordPress.
And then of course you want it to be sure it has
quite a few active installs and it has good reviews,
right, good ratings.
But I tried this one and to be very honest with you,
I wasn't that impressed.
It was actually a little cumbersome,
a little difficult to install.
So this is just average for me.
The solution that I found is this one,
Q2W3 Fixed Widget.
It's kind of a funky name but it's a perfect solution
to fix the issue on your website.
Notice how many more active installs it has,
and of course, it's tested with great ratings.
I'm gonna give it a review as well.
Let me show you how to install it in your dashboard.
So you'll head into your WordPress dashboard
and you'll go over here to plugins,
and just click Add New, of course.
Once you get to this screen, you're gonna do
a quick search for the Q2W3, here it is right here.
And of course, again, you always wanna be sure,
best practices, it has great reviews,
a lot of active installs, and it's up to date
and compatible with your version.
Click Install Now.
It just takes literally a couple of seconds.
And then of course you wanna click Activate.
Once that's activated, now, you actually have
a new area inside of your dashboard
over underneath appearance.
So you're gonna go over in appearance,
fixed widget options.
So that's the space here.
Now this might seem a little bit of tricky for ya,
but don't worry about it, it all actually already works.
Even without having to come in here and make some changes,
it's already been effective into your website.
So here's what you'll wanna do.
You'll wanna go in your widgets area
and whatever widget you want to actually be sticky,
or fixed, you'll open it up and you'll click the little box
that says fixed widget.
This is now a brand new area that exists
because you've installed this plugin.
So then you check that box and click Save.
And you do that to every single one of the areas
that you want to be sticky, or to stay on that page.
Then you come back over to the front side of your website,
click refresh, and then as you scroll,
you're gonna see it stay put.
Do you see it live there on that right side now?
Beautifully positioned.
And as I scroll down, there it is.
I want you to see something, though.
This is a little error that's happening on my website.
It's actually going underneath my footer area right here
and it doesn't know that I've got content that lives here.
And you can see it kinda playing peek-a-boo
with my last widget all the way down
here at the very bottom.
So how do you solve that issue?
It's actually really smart.
The plugin developer gave you an area to fix that.
You're gonna come back over here
into your fixed widget options.
And you're looking for this stop ID area.
So this just says, Here you need to provide
the HTML tag ID or the position,
basically the HTML element, that will determine
the margin bottom value, or the stopping point,
of where you need the fixed area to just stop.
So for a lot of you, on your theme,
it's gonna be your footer area.
So you would just look in here
underneath your inspect element
and figure out what your author coded this footer area.
Right?
That's all you would do.
But I'm using the Divi theme,
so I can actually do this all myself.
So check this out.
I'm gonna go ahead, just for now, and say stop.
That's the word I'm gonna use here for my stop ID.
You can put any word here
if you're creating your own HTML ID.
But if your author has a different one
you'll have to find that using your inspect element.
For me, though, I'm gonna put that in there
and click save changes.
And then on the front side of my website,
I'm using a global setting inside of Divi.
And again, this is only relevant if you're using Divi.
But this down here, this one area, is a global element.
So inside of my Divi tools, I'm gonna go to my Divi library.
And my global settings is my Ask form here.
And see the global here?
That little icon means it's a global module or section.
Inside of this, you can actually set a custom ID,
if you wanted to.
You go into the advanced area.
And the CSS ID, I'm just gonna put that exact spelling,
same cap and everything, stop, right here.
And click save and exit.
So, and then of course you would click Update.
save and exit.
And now, when you go back to your website,
it already put that in there for us.
Let's go to one of these individual ones.
I'm gonna go to one of my individual blog articles here.
And you'll see now that it no longer overlaps,
it knows where to stop.
Stays fixed with me, and then there's all
of my beautiful widgets perfectly lined up.
And it stops at my stop div.
Pretty fun, huh, you guys?
It's a great solution and it's certainly
one of the better ones in the budget of free
that I have found out there.
If you have questions about it, though,
I'm hoping that you'll come over here
to their actual landing page for the plugin,
come over in the support area and you can find all sorts
of questions here, you can submit your own questions
and get support from the developers directly,
because they're the geniuses behind how all of it works.
I hope that helped you,
I hope you have a great WordPress Wednesday.
Be sure to subscribe because every week
I'm creating a video just like this
to help you improve your online marketing.
I'll see you next time.
Bye y'all.
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