Best Free Sidebar WordPress Plugins
Want to have more control over your website’s sidebar without changing your current WordPress theme?
There are so many free sidebar WordPress plugins that will give you full control over the sidebar of your website. You can display your favorite widgets, features, and posts on the sidebar. And you can even build different sidebars on different pages and posts of your website.
Here, we have collected 10 of the best free WordPress sidebar plugins. Spend some of your time playing with them and find the one that really suits your website’s design and functionalities.
Table of Contents
Custom Sidebars – Dynamic Widget Area Manager
Custom Sidebars – Dynamic Widget Area Manager is a free sidebar WordPress plugin with which you can manage and replace sidebars and other widget areas on your website with a custom sidebar.
This custom sidebar is highly flexible and lets you choose specific widgets to display on an individual page or post of your website. You can display custom widgets on custom sidebars on any page, post, post type, archive page, and category page. It even offers specific sidebars display for individual authors of your website.
The plugin integrates seamlessly with the widgets menu and does not slow down your website.
SMK Sidebar Generator
SMK Sidebar Generator is a free WordPress sidebar plugin that lets you build as many sidebars as you want and place them on any page of your website.
The plugin allows you to sort the sidebar position easily by drag and dropping. You can easily replace the default theme sidebar by using the conditions or by picking the sidebar that you want to replace. And you don’t have to touch a single line of code while using this plugin.
The plugin has now over 50,000 active installations.
Content Aware Sidebars – Unlimited Widget Areas
Content Aware Sidebars is one of the fastest and most powerful free WordPress sidebar plugins with which you can create widget-ready areas like sidebars in websites. You can create any type of sidebar including a post sidebar, page sidebar, category sidebar, and more.
With this plugin, you can show specific kinds of content on the sidebar like the content of selected authors, date archives, taxonomy archives, content with specific tags or categories, and so on.
The plugin works well with all the major page builders like Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, Page Builder by SiteOrigin, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, and more. It supports many major plugins like bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce, WPML, Polylang, Easy Digital Downloads, TranslatePress, and more.
Simple Page Sidebars
Simple Page Sidebars is a free and simple WordPress sidebar plugin for WordPress website that gives WordPress users, developers, and designers the power to build custom sidebars on individual pages without affecting the design of the template.
You can also use its bulk edit mode feature to edit the existing sidebars quickly. Unlike many other sidebar plugins, Simple Page Sidebars aspires for basic and easy-to-use functionality.
The most likable benefits you get with this free sidebar plugin is you will have a page or post-specif sidebar with specific widgets. No more site-wide or generic sidebars! If you want to show the same sidebar at multiple pages, you can do that too.
Advanced Sidebar Menu
Advanced Sidebar Menu is a popular advanced free sidebar plugin for WordPress websites. This free WordPress plugin has page and category widgets and it also offers an option to show or hide the parent page or category.
With this plugin, you can also order your pages according to their date, title, page, order, and so on. You can also exclude specific pages or categories from displaying on the sidebar. You can also choose to display or hide categories on single products and posts.
And if you want more features like blocks styling options, custom post types display options and accordion options, you can upgrade to its premium version.
Sidebar Manager
Sidebar Manager free WordPress sidebar plugin lets you display a specific and relevant sidebar on certain pages of your website. With Sidebar Manager, you can easily create new sidebars and show them on certain pages of your site. You can also choose what widgets to display on those sidebars.
Some impressive features of Sidebar Manager free WordPress sidebar plugin are the unlimited sidebars possibilities, option to display the widgets on the sidebar or footer, conditional sidebar display options on specific posts, pages, taxonomies, and categories. You can also display sidebars according to user roles. And last but not least, the plugin is compatible with all the WordPress themes.
Posts in Sidebar
Posts in Sidebar is a free sidebar WordPress plugin that you can use to display a list of posts on your sidebar. You can choose different criteria so that you can display specific kinds of posts on the sidebar.
After installing the plugin, your website shows a new widget that you can place in the sidebar and select from the different options to display the widget. You can choose to display the posts according to their exact IDs, meta key, modification date, recent comments, category, authors, taxonomies, and more.
WP Sticky Sidebar
WP Sticky Sidebar – Floating Sidebar On Scroll for Any Theme
WP Sticky Sidebar plugin lets you build a floating sidebar menu on your website. You can use this free sidebar WordPress plugin to make your sidebar menu visible at all times.
Using this plugin will reduce the bounce rate of your website as it increases the accessibility and usability of your website.
You can also change the CSS style of the sidebar, disable the sidebar while the visitor is scrolling down, or disable the sidebar on certain pages.
Fuse Social Floating Sidebar
Fuse Social Floating Sidebar is ideal for those who want to display sticky social media icons on the sidebar. This free and lightweight sidebar plugin lets you add unlimited icons from the admin dashboard under Settings Menu.
When it comes to settings and customization of those social media icons, you have plenty of options to choose from. You can use round or square icons, animated rotation effect, shadow effect in icons, and social icons size options with this free sidebar WordPress plugin. You can add social icons of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, RSS, Pinterest, and so on.
Video Sidebar Widgets
Video Sidebar Widgets is a free WordPress sidebar plugin to display videos on the sidebar of your website. With this plugin, you can display flash videos from different video networks like YouTube, Vimeo, BlipTV, WordPress.tv, Veoh, Metacafe, Revver, MySpace Videos, DailyMotion, Viddler, Tudou, Youku, and 6.cn. The plugin has a total of 3 widgets.
Final Words,
Free sidebar WordPress plugins can be the easiest and most effective way to get the most out of your sidebar. You don’t have the change the theme of your website and you don’t need to do any coding. Just pick the right sidebar plugin and display the right widgets and features that will help you skyrocket the success of your website.