Are Sidebars Dumb?

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Can you believe Q1 (the first quarter) is almost over already? 2024 is just zooming here. 🤪

In this week’s issue of the newsletter, we’re going to talk sidebars. As in, left or right? Or even more relevant… should you even have one anymore? I share my recommendations.

Also, I want to again make the case of why I think you should have your email list inside of WordPress instead of paying some remote service. It goes way beyond saving money.

And in our big summary of WordPress news from the last week, we’ve got WordPress 6.5 coming out and…. Awesome Motive being “less than awesome” again? 😜

Anyway, got a lot for you below in this week’s issue.

And I hope you’re enjoy this newsletter each week. As always, my inbox is open for your responses and feedback on any issue.

OK, let’s get it…

Blog Sidebar: Right, Left or… None?

Do you still have a blog sidebar? And if you do, is it on the left or the right? Does it matter?

It is funny. Back in the earlier days of blogging, you’d see so many proclamations about which was better. Frankly, back then people cared about sidebars. 🤪

Left-aligned sidebars were more likely to fall in the reader’s “eye path”. Since a lot of readers are accustomed to reading from left to right, the idea is/was that a left sidebar would be more noticed.

Somehow, though, right-aligned sidebars became the norm. It is just what… everybody does.

Matt Woodward did a split test on one site and his findings were that it simply didn’t matter if the sidebar was right or left.

Based on my own experience in the past, I think there are two main times when a left sidebar makes sense:

  • You’re putting major navigation into the sidebar. Site navigation or table of contents really is easier to use on the left.
  • Ads. While I hate ads these days, back when I used to run banner ads, I did find we had better performance when the sidebar ad was on the left versus the right.

But, truth is… as Matt found above, it really doesn’t matter these days.

People are used to the right. So, that’s what most sites do.

Or… just get rid of it altogether.

Truth is… one of the reasons it doesn’t matter much whether the sidebar is left or right… is because most people barely even notice the sidebar to begin with. These days, the sidebar is just… noise. A lot of blogs just clutter the things up anyway. People tune them out. They’re there to see your content, so they barely pay any notice to your sidebar.

Plus, don’t forget that on mobile devices, the sidebar is usually pushed way down to the bottom anyway and people will literally never see it.

So, if that’s the case… why have one at all?

These days, more and more sites have ditched their sidebar. The result? Much cleaner sites. Less bullcrap. And more focus on your content.

If you must run banner advertising, then the real estate of your sidebar is valuable. I can understand that. But, for almost any other call to action, it will almost always perform better if it is within your actual content box than it will in the sidebar.

Your opt-ins will work better within your content than in your sidebar. ⬅️

So, here’s a summary of my recommendations with regard to your sidebar:

  • For most blogs these days, I recommend not having a sidebar. It is rather useless in most cases.
  • If you’re going to have one, align it to the right unless you’re using it for primary navigation.
  • If you’re going to have one, put ONE call to action in it. Don’t get all widget-happy, my friends. 😇 Just put an opt-in form in the sidebar and make it “sticky” so it will stay in place as the user scrolls.

Keep in mind, this mainly applies to blog posts. Other pages of your site probably shouldn’t have a sidebar anyway. But, certainly, there are times when a sidebar is needed for functionality. And if that’s the case, use it.

But, our blogs are used for content marketing. Our goal with these posts is to help people and move them into their next step (via a call to action). This is just content marketing 101, right? And in that situation… the sidebar is usually just noise. Especially with the way most people use it.

So, be intentional about your sidebar. Do what makes sense. Don’t just follow whatever the default of your theme is.

Let Somebody Else Deal With The “Tech Stuff”

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WordPress Quick Bits…

Bunny.net Updates Their WordPress Plugin. Bunny.net is a useful service. I think of it like Amazon S3… except made for humans. 😜 But, it is usable for many things and that includes as a CDN. They’ve announced an improved WordPress plugin to make it super simple to integrate the Bunny.net CDN into your site. The new Offloader functionality makes it super easy to offload static media files onto Bunny. They also offer some performance enhancing functions now. Super cool update. Click here to check out the plugin.

xCloud Hosting Updates. xCloud has introduced two updates to the server suite for your servers on the platform. Their Fail2Ban integration now gives you the ability to ban/unban IP addresses on your own. And their Firewall management now give you the ability to control your own firewall rules.

WordPress 6.5 Dropping This Week. We expect WordPress 6.5 to be officially released tomorrow (March 26). WP Beginner has a nice roundup of the new features. Among the list are things like localized font control, plugin dependencies (for plugins to specify other plugins as requirements to run), a bunch of updates to the block builder, etc. As with any updates, back up your site first and test.

WordPress Plugin Price Cheating? I’ve been seeing this article making the rounds again about fake pricing on some WordPress plugins. Where plugins act like you’re getting a discount off regular pricing… but the regular pricing isn’t real. We all know it happens. Looking at you, Awesome Motive. 😜 But, like I said when Kyle posted this in The Admin Bar, this article is rather outdated and the examples aren’t really true anymore. Secondly, it isn’t good to get into a headspace where we rip on companies for using pricing strategies to increase conversion. That’s NORMAL for businesses. As long as it isn’t fake, don’t hate. Plus, rather ironic this post was written on Medium and not WordPress, but I digress. 😂

AgentWP In Alpha Testing. AgentWP might be one worth watching. It is called “your AI copilot for WordPress”. And… “Using advanced AI models custom-trained for WordPress, AgentWP has the capabilities of a skilled developer.”. Hmm… seems a wee bit hypey, but I admit to being intrigued. Will be one to keep an eye on.

RockBase Theme Launches. A new big theme launched called RockBase. It is a new block theme, similar to Kadence (which I use all the time). Looks like it has some great features and some beautiful pre-made design patterns to make building your site pretty quick. This is a premium theme and I will say… I think their pricing is a little steep. But, will be interesting to see how it develops.

All In One WP Migration Gets A Reset Hub. The popular site migration plugin has gotten a new feature called Reset Hub. It allows you to… reset WordPress. As in, purging plugins and themes and basically revert WordPress back to how it was originally installed.

AffiliateWP Now Breaks Without a License. AffiliateWP is GPL-licensed, but it was also acquired by Awesome Motive in 2021. And you know what that can mean. 😪 They’re giving it the Thrive Themes treatment…. disabling the code if your license code isn’t entered and active. In fact, the nag screens I’ve seen for this are downright alarming and obviously worded to scare the crap out of you… saying your business is “at risk”. Look, there’s nothing wrong with using license codes for updates and for support. That’s how GPL works. But, outright disabling the code? That’s not how GPL is supposed to work. But, I’ve come to expect this kind of thing from Awesome Motive.

4 Advantages To Email Marketing Inside WordPress

A lot of people host and run their email list from outside companies. Companies like Aweber, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite and many others. But, I have been a big proponent of bringing it back “in house” and doing it right from inside WordPress.

Personally, I use and recommend FluentCRM.

But, this isn’t just about liking FluentCRM. It isn’t just about saving money.

If you’re using WordPress, then there are multiple advantages to having your email list within WordPress. Things that just make life easier.

Integration With WordPress Core

When you run your email marketing within WordPress, that means it will be integrated into the core of WordPress.

One way this comes in handy is that you have automatic syncing with the user database, allowing you to have perfect two-way integration with user profiles (if you want it).

You can also control user roles by way of tags.

If you want to get nerdy, you can even take control of things by way of using built-in Wordpress hooks… or by using shortcodes.

No Integration Headaches

When you’re using external software, you need to use special plugins, APIs or even webhooks to integrate with your site. That’s because your site is in one spot… while your email list is “over there” in another spot. And you’re sitting there flinging data around.

The whole thing is made even more complex when you use an external shopping cart as well.

I’ve seen a lot of sites that end up needing to use Zapier to integrate things. I’ve seen sites that depend on webhooks to create user profiles on their membership site…. and sometimes webhooks just fail.

When you’re trying to mix remote pieces of software together, things can become unwieldy at times. Having it all in one spot – within WordPress – greatly simplifies things.

Easy Integration With Your Website Stack

The flip side of avoiding integration headaches is, of course, the fact that integrations are so much easier when everything is already inside of WordPress.

There are so many easy and automatic integrations with membership plugins, ecommerce, LMS (like Learndash), etc. You don’t have to go out and seek ways to integrate this stuff. It is already done!

In my opinion, the best combination of tools for almost any membership site I build these days is FluentCRM, WooCommerce, and WP Fusion.You can read more about this combo in my post The Ultimate Blueprint to Building Your Membership Site. If you want appointment booking, throw FluentBooking into the mix (see my review). The high degree of automatic integration here makes for such a powerful platform. This is the kind of integration that would be a true pain in the ass if you were to build it by cobbling together a bunch of remotely hosted tools.

Ability To Customize Your Experience

One of the beauties of running your CRM software within WordPress is that you can customize things.

On the flip side, when you’re using some remotely hosted software that you rent every month, you have to sit there and submit feature requests and hope they add the missing features you wanted.

Now, sometimes customizing your CRM requires a bit of coding. But, the fact it can be done at all is huge.

On my site, here are a few things I’ve got inside of FluentCRM…

  • I built an entire service credit system to manage Anytime Credits… and people’s credits as well as their entire service log shows up within FluentCRM.
  • I now use FluentBooking for appointments, which means I now have people’s appointment histories right inside the CRM.
  • I use Fluent Forms, which means I can see people’s form submissions in their CRM profile.

You can add custom tabs to your CRM profile. Of course, you can use custom fields. And it is easy to integrate those custom fields into other parts of your site so that all the data you want is all in one spot. The whole thing is done in PHP and runs on your database, which means if you have the skills… you can really customize things to your specific needs.

It is so incredibly difficult to build something this customized in a remote tool. People often end up paying hundreds of dollars per month to try to build something like this.

…

These days, with all the sites I am involved with on behalf of clients, it is quite rare that I find that any client would be better served by using a remotely hosted email management solution.

In most cases, they’re there because they’ve been there for awhile and they think it is a pain to move their list. They don’t want to confront the change.

But, I know from experience here that the advantages of hosting the list within WordPress are many. It simply makes things simpler. And especially when you’re running a membership site, it makes things so much easier. The level of integration can be so tight.

Not to mention… the whole thing is so much more cost effective.

And, for those who worry about email deliverability, it isn’t any issue. Because you’re usually using the same email sending servers as the “big guys”. We often tap into Amazon. I also use PostMark (powered by ActiveCampaign). So, we use reputable senders. We just control the platform. And that brings with it multiple advantages.