How to Fix a Sidebar That Moves or Disappears in WordPress

How to Fix a Sidebar That Moves or Disappears in WordPress

Is your WordPress sidebar gone? Or has it moved to a different location? This annoying problem can seemingly appear out of nowhere. One day your blog looks fine, and then suddenly your sidebar is all messed up.

This has occurred several times on my blog, and every single time it was due to improper HTML coding. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to troubleshoot without being a coding guru.

Pull up recent blog posts and look at them carefully in HTML view.

While in edit mode, this means choosing “Test” instead of “Visual” on the top right side of the post screen. You are looking for things in the code of your post like unneeded </div> tags, opens tags and improper image coding. Remove all </div> tags from the post content. Close any open tags that don’t have the proper ending punctuation. Examples:

“should be “” and

Another common cause of the sidebar error is using disproportionate width for an image in a blog post. Check and adjust the widths of anything you’ve recently published. See if making it smaller fixes the layout problem on your site.

Look at your sidebar widgets.

If you recently added any graphics or elements to your sidebar, double check the code on those and look for the same problems mentioned above (overly wide widths and HTML errors).

Occasionally, sidebar problems need a more complicated fix and require some knowledge of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). But fortunately, I’ve been able to fix the glitch every time just by finding and correcting basic HTML errors.

2 Comments

  1. Ann
  2. Heather Johnson

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