How to Add a FREE Sidebar to Your Squarespace Website
Before I knew about plugins, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to create a sidebar. Of course, I googled it many times, and I’ve read a lot about how you can ‘fake’ a sidebar just using blocks. This works really well for your main blog page, but my biggest concern was if I was to put a ‘fake’ sidebar on every single one of my blog posts using blocks, what if I needed to then change something on the sidebar? I would have to go back through 100’s of posts and do it manually? Nope!
So ideally, I wanted to build my sidebar in one place and if I needed to make a change on it, it would populate throughout my whole site/blog.
I figured it out, and I’m going to tell you my secrets!
Step 1:
First we will need to add a Blog page to the Not Linked section of our website. I’ve named mine Sidebar, for reference.
Step 2:
After the new blog is added, you need to decide what content to display on your sidebar. For my example, I chose to display individual categories related to my blog. After you decide what content to display, go ahead and create an individual blog post for each linked image and change to featured image to the one of your chosing.
Step 3:
Now that you decided what content to display, you need to link the content to the specific page you want your readers directed to. To do this, you need to go into the individual blog posts setting > scroll down and check “Link Post Title to Source URL” > paste the URL of the page readers are re-directed to. Since I chose to direct people to specific categories, I pasted the category URL in that section.
Step 4:
Now that your sidebar is setup, its time to put it to work! go to the blog post you want to add your sidebar to and insert a summary block. Adjust the summary block and page content to your liking (I like to put my summary block on the far left.) Next, make sure your summary block is set up as a wall, then turn off all elements except the featured image. After this, you can adjust the summary blocks margins to your liking.
You may have to adjust some aspects to get it fit to your personal preferences, but there you have it! This is a quick, easy and most importantly FREE way to create sidebars for your SquareSpace website!
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!
