You must have noticed that on my 3 sites I changed the fixed top menu to a fixed sidebar. Why did I do that? What are the advantages and differences? In this article, I want to describe this big change.
I hope this article with my opinion will help you decide whether to use a side sidebar or a fixed menu at the top.
- - - -Over these 5 years I have always liked a set menu at the top of the site. While many left a menu at the top, but not fixed, I insisted on leaving it fixed for people to use whenever possible.
I believed that this allowed people to browse the site more on different pages, but in practice nobody does that. Visits to the category pages are very low, nor is it a search for people to do on the site.
This is one of the consequences of having organic visits, where people simply enter, read and leave the site. For this reason it is important to have a very engaging and original writing to make the person a follower of the site.
Just like the menus, I realized that a Sidebar (sidebar) does not bring as many results as forms and links within the article. Today I currently use an email capture just below the website's article title to generate leads both on desktop and mobile.
Over the years I tried to capture leads, make people interact and navigate the site through the sidebar. With a while I realized that the sidebars left the site very ugly, until I chose to use only one column of the article.
I really liked this layout style, which required me to increase the default size of the images I uploaded to the server. The page, both on mobile and on the desktop, showed only the article without distractions on the sides.
I abandoned the use of sidebar Widgets in WordPress and placed only 3 in the Footer where rarely anyone pays attention. With the capture form at the beginning of the article, I captured leads from all devices without needing popups and in a discreet way.
This form in the Header, similar to what viverdeblog used, significantly increased my conversions, making me the top affiliate in my main niche. With it, I never felt the need to use widgets or a sidebar for years.
Embarrassed by the site's speed, I tried to minimize page requests as much as possible, even using a super ultra light layout called generatepress. By doing this, I ended up opting to replace the fixed menu with a sidebar.
Of course, that was not the only reason, nor is it a viable reason, since the PageSpeed score was hindered by the google ads that I place on the site. I had wanted to put a sidebar on the site for a while, but I wanted an alternative to the standard sidebar.
The standard sidebar of wordpress themes makes the box containing the article text smaller. This bothered me a lot because I liked that large box that gives the impression of an open text file in Word or Pages.
I found that some themes used a header and menu on the side that allowed the placement of widgets, becoming a real side sidebar that does not interfere with the layout of my site and pays attention to its location on the left.
In the GeneratePress Site Library there were 2 settings that left the site that way. After hours setting everything up in CSS I managed to make the theme of my website the way I wanted it.
The biggest advantage is that the Mobile Menu displays the Widgets, which most of the time is played to the bottom of the page on mobile devices. Even if the widgets are placed to be displayed before the article, they would occupy a huge space.
The mobile expansive menu allows me to display more information, ads, forms, links and menus before the article is displayed, only if the person chooses to expand the menu out of curiosity. I also continue to use email capture in the article title.
The biggest difficulty of this change is choosing colors and making a beautiful designer. At first the light colors I chose made my website look like a 2003 HTML site. After many changes I arrived at a satisfactory result.
Using this Sidebar I was able to delete 3 add-ons from the GeneratePress theme saving my WordPress processes. Another thing that bothered me in the beginning was the way the page loads with a cache plugin, you might notice.
It took me days to configure the CSS to make the category selectors that I used beautiful. Also leave a custom scrollbar in the side sidebar for the designer to look more modern. I'm still not entirely satisfied, with time more changes will be made.
The objective is simple and clear, to present the best possible experience for the user, monetize the website in the best possible way, increase the page speed, increase the ranking of the website and capture more leads.