Make a Full Width Page For Your WordPress Theme

A Full Width Page is one that has no sidebars and all the width of the page is just content. Such a page has many applications. You might not wish to show sidebars on your contact page for instance. Well, lets see some better applications of Full-Width Pages.

Full Width Page in WordPress

Making a Sales Page – Traditional sales pages don’t have sidebars (haven’t you seen those pages with lots of customer feedback and that pages where you have to scroll miles and miles to see the end?). Removing Sidebar makes it look better.

Search Result Pages for Google Custom Search Engine – If you choose to display results of Google CSE on your own pages; the script they give you can insert ads on the right of the searches just as we see on Google. A full width page can make way for the ads.

Enough, lets do it.

Best WordPress Themes

Going Full Width on any WordPress Theme

As an example, I will use this Theme – This Just In!. It’s a simple and elegant Free Theme and comes with an image gallery just below the header.

Step 1 – Make a Page Template

Pages in WordPress are defined by page.php in the theme. Make a copy of page.php and rename it as fullwidth.php. It doesn’t matter what you name it, it can be yourname.php instead.

Now add the following to the start of the code in fullwidth.php :

<?php
/*
Template Name: Full Width
*/
?>

Save and lo! we just defined a custom page template.

Step 2 – Rip Off the Sidebars

Sidebars are included in the page template using this :

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

Delete it from fullwidth.php. In most themes it should be towards the end of the code. Sidebars are gone.

Step 3 – Define a Full Width Style

Open up style.css and find where the style of the content area is defined. Usually its called #content. In our example theme, the style is defined as:

#content
{
margin: 5px 35px 0;
font-size: 1.2em;
width: 575px;
float: left;
display: inline;
}

You can see that in line three the width of the content area is defined as 575 px. Copy paste all the above said code and define a new ID #contentwide as:

#contentwide
{
margin: 5px 35px 0;
font-size: 1.2em;
width: 850px;
float: left;
display: inline;
}

The only change being the width in line three as 850px. The value 850 px was found by trial and error.

StepΒ  4 – Add the style to the Page

If you try making a full width page after step 3, you will get a page with no sidebar, but the sidebar area is blank. Why? The page still uses the style in the content ID. Open up fullwidth.php again and change the id content to contentwide in the code.

<div id="contentwide">

That’s it, upload fullwidth.php and style.css to the theme folder.

How to Actually Create a Full Width Page?

Open a New Page Editor. Write in some content. From the right sidebar of the page editor, from the section called Attributes, select Template as Full Width.

Select Full Width Template in Editor

Publish the page. Congrats!

If you have any queries or if I missed anything, use the comments. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful. What are you using that full width page for?

P.S: If you need help with your theme to make a full width page, contact me with your details.

P.P.S: Also checkout some of the themes that I love here and here. They come with Full width support and great theme options and support. I use these theme on a lot of my projects.

Hello, I am Arun Basil Lal. Thank you for reading!

I am a WordPress product developer and creator of Image Attributes Pro. I am passionate about solving problems and travelling the world.

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131 Comments.

  1. This is a great tutorial for creating squeeze pages for your blog if you don’t want to pay for one! Thanks!

  2. I’ve used full width on one of my blogs but it is not working as effectively as I would have hoped so I am going to go back to the two column version.

  3. Fred says:

    Very cool, and just what I needed. Thanks for taking the time to post.

  4. Tomas says:

    Hi and thanks for the tutorial!

    It’s just what I’m looking for although I’m a little stuck.

    I’m using manifest as my wordpress theme, I tried the above and it doesn’t appear to work.

    It’s a single column template and as opposed to having ‘#content’ it has a #coreContent.

    Would you have any advice for this theme?

    Many thanks!

  5. Daniel says:

    I got the template created, and I can see it in the drop down field when I edit pages. But when I select the full width template and save the page, it remains under the default page. Also, I think my theme is way more complex than the one used in your example, and I can decipher which areas to modify to make the full width template actually full width. There’s no one place that I can change the width. There are several widths listed, but I can’t test any of them until I can get my page to save as the full width template.

    Any ideas?

  6. Adam says:

    Thanks for the tutorial! I’ve noticed that many of the newer premium themes are now making it a default option to select whether a page is or isn’t full width. I’m glad that they are finally catching on! I use Woo Themes for most of my sites, and all of the newer themes have this feature.

  7. aaron says:

    The tutorial helped…but now I’ve discovered a bigger issue. My attributes metabox is missing! I’ve made sure I’m at the latest version of WP, optimized and repaired SQL tables, disabled and re-enabled plugins…I’m shooting blanks now.

  8. Angus in Naperville says:

    Thank you so much for the tutorial. I love the “This Just In” theme but was having issues with some content bleeding over into the sidebar. Your fix was perfect for this:
    http://www.yourbestmooove.com/blog/advanced-search/

  9. Andy says:

    Thank you so much!!! But… how can I add posts in a full width page??? Could you help me?

  10. Jeremy says:

    Thank you so much for this clear explanation. I looked everywhere for this and this explained it clear and concisely.

    Thanks again for this.

  11. Fatima says:

    You ROCK…thanks so much!!!!!

  12. Dave says:

    wow thanks so much for this easy to follow tutorial !!!

  13. Michael says:

    Thanks for this lucid and useful explanation.

    I was able to apply your advice to a custom child theme of the twentyten default theme that ships with WordPress 3.0, but I had to make a couple of tweaks. I’m a novice, so these may not be best practices, but I share them in case they’re useful.

    First I followed the instructions here for creating a child theme.

    In Step 1, I added fullwidth.php to my child theme’s folder, not to the main theme’s. (It’s still a copy of page.php from the main theme.)

    In Step 3, I didn’t change style.css in the main theme, but in my child theme.

    In Step 3, I copied EVERY reference to #content from the parent’s style.css to the child’s style.css. I renamed all of them from #content to #contentwide. I believe there were 62 of them.

    In Step 3, instead of changing the width under #contentwide, I added the margins, from something like this in the parent style.css:
    #content { margin: 0 280px 0 20px;}
    to something like this in the child style.css:
    #contentwide { margin: 0 20px 0 20px;}

    That’s it. I haven’t tried all the features yet, but it appears to work.

  14. Matthew Peters says:

    Thanks so much! You saved me a headache tonight. I think I can all it a night sooner too!

  15. Surendhar says:

    It works Great

  16. Terese says:

    This worked perfectly on my GamePro theme. Thanks!

  17. wing2go says:

    I’m exhausted trying to make full page in twentyten. When I read Micheal’s method, I thought perhaps that is the thing I have not tried; changing every occurance of content to contentwide in child style.css. There are so many talks out there about changing a few lines of codes such as the width, but never work.

    However, after the changes, it still does not work. I don’t want to give up on twentyten after having done so much on my working protocol. Any help would be appreciated.

    This is my modified fullwide.php after copying from page.php

    <div id="post-” >

    ” . __( ‘Pages:’, ‘twentyten’ ), ‘after’ => ” ) ); ?>
    <?php edit_post_link( __( 'Edit', 'twentyten' ), '’, ” ); ?>


    • Wing2go says:

      After adjusting the floating of container div with the early instruction, I finally got rid of the sidebar with full width.

  18. Brilliant tutorial. I’m fairly new to WP but you made it simple enough for me to understand and it worked first time! Thank you for taking the time to post this.

  19. Milind says:

    First of all, your blog, especially the topic here “make a page wide” is excellent. I thought it would work for me, but the theme I am using “exciter” has no sidebars, has no entry as #content either, but I found this “div.page .column {” but it had very few entries and I did not dare to change. Anyway I have bookmarked your site, subscribed and wish you would post similar items.
    BTW, do you know of any book/site/tutorial that could teach all this? I mean simpler things? I have seen many tuts but even though they aim for beginners, they miss simple topics such as “how to draw a line” or “how to give extra space between lines” or “what is a .div tag” etc. May be sometimes you would write on that. Thanks for writing such a good blog. Cheers

  20. Trevor Lyman says:

    This blog is a lifesaver. I use the EProduct theme from Templatic and they provide a “full-page” php template but it looks really stupid and doesn’t just remove the sidebars.

    After about two hours of fiddling around, flipping back and forth between this blog and my admin section, I finally figured it out!

    My site doesn’t have any full-width pages yet but it will so very soon.

    THANKS!

  21. Trevor Lyman says:

    This blog is a lifesaver. I use the EProduct theme from Templatic and they provide a “full-page” php template but it looks really stupid and doesn’t just remove the sidebars.

    After about two hours of fiddling around, flipping back and forth between this blog and my admin section, I finally figured it out!

    My site doesn’t have any full-width pages yet but it will so very soon.

    THANKS!

  22. Frank says:

    Really a wise post, This info was very useful for me for to make the bases for a fullwith page in a template taht have not this resource, Thanks !!!

  23. Stefan says:

    Maybe you can help, IΒ΄m using the smartone theme. When I tried to edit a copy of the page.php file, I couldnΒ΄t find the “get_sidebar”-part, that I am supposed to delete. What went wrong? Thanx in advance, your effort is greatly appreciated!

  24. Tim Gauthier says:

    I’ve tried using your steps with little to no results.
    I mean it all makes sense to me. It should work, but I’m not seeing whats causing the mix up.

    Once I do your steps and then try to make a test full width page and view it… I get a solid white page. Even without source. Any idea what could be causing this?

    The site is: http://www.dimmakrecs.com & the test full width page is: http://www.dimmakrecs.com/full-width-tester-page/

    Thanks in advance.

  25. Leah Dossey says:

    This post is one of the reasons I love the internet. 1 google search + your post + 5 minutes = 1 successful completion of creating my full page template for my site. You’ve been added to my bookmarks as resource. Thanks!

  26. chris says:

    How do I make my home page full width with Thematic, without making it static… ? THANKS

  27. KafeChew says:

    Bravo! Finally, I made it! Thanks to your tutorial. After removing the sidebar, I can add a greater size of iframe without causing any conflict anymore! Just that, I still can see the blank sidebar place, but already enough for me. But, if you are free, you maybe take my site a look on the “contentwide” template page. Thanks a lot! You really make my day!

  28. Still blonde says:

    OH my goodness. I took all day to figure out how to go to a full width post and insert a pdf at full width on my WP-Ellie theme. Your tutorial was the key. solved the whole problem I was having in like 5 minutes. Actually WP-Ellie has a page with no side bar options and it was doing exactly what you talked about in beginning of Step 4. So (not knowing a dang thing about code) I just went into the code for “Page–no Sidebar” as you advised for the page and changed it to “contentwide”! Whoopie, I could put in a whole page of text now.

    The pdf thing took quite a while too but changed the Embed code to 850 (as you suggested and Viola!) another problem solved .

    IS there a “Contribute” button around here somewhere??? You are so awesome!

  29. Lee S. says:

    You rock. I usually know only enough to get into trouble. But, this worked perfectly for me. Thanks for the concise instructions!

  30. ssquirehi says:

    The tutorial makes sense, but the Full Width page only moved the sidebar a little bit: http://www.barklowimages.com/about/ Any ideas? The template is Versatility Lite 1.6. Thanks.

  31. Swathi Reddy says:

    thanks thanks thanks.I was finding for this solution how to display installed simple press forum on full page.I wasted time for 3 4 days but i cant solve the problem but at last your information had solved this if any one facing same problem as mine check this link whether you may see what i changed and how my forum is looking like.http://www.daytodayinfo.com/forum. There is very less information on the web about this simple forum plugin installation in worpress and changing the forum to full page.Thanks very much bye.

  32. danial says:

    thanks for the info but it still is not clear to me how to make the width bigger. i use twenty ten theme and i want to have my whole theme bigger and larger. i also miss the part of attribute because i can’t find it no where.

  33. Nidiya says:

    Thanks a lot for this useful tutorial. I have gone through a lot of articles and tutorial video’s on how to create a full width page template. and they didn’t work.
    after reading this Tutorial I was able to create a full width sales page on my site.
    thanks again.

  34. Gokay says:

    Arun, in the page of forum the right sidebar area shows blank. But I’ve deleted necessary code from new template.

    http://www.oyun dragon.com/forum (delete spaces)

  35. Ray says:

    Hello. I hope this thread is still active πŸ˜€ Anyways, i had a problem on step 2, i don’t have anything called ” ” in my page.php (fullwidth.php), sooo.. I am kinda lost at this point.

    Is it named diferent in any way or something?

    Here is my fullwidth code, if that helps.

    <div id="post-">

    <?php the_content('Read the rest of this page'); ?>

    'Pages: ', 'after' => '', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>

    Thank you for awesome guide, i just hope i can get it to work πŸ˜€

  36. Ray says:

    guess my code didnt show.. uhm, here it is.

    <div id="post-“>

    <?php the_content('Read the rest of this page’); ?>

    Pages: ‘, ‘after’ => ”, ‘next_or_number’ => ‘number’)); ?>

  37. Chuck says:

    The instructions were very easy to understand. I did everything exactly as described but when I go to add a new page there is no option in the attributes for “fullwidth” What did I miss?

  38. RODRIGO says:

    It works Great

  39. Ryan O'Meara says:

    Well this post just saved me $68 – so thanks! I was thinking of buying a premium theme purely because the free version did not have the full width page option. Now I don’t need to, thanks again!

  40. Chris says:

    Great tutorial! I got it to work on my first try but I was wondering if I could use this to change Buddypress pages to full width pages. When I enable FullWidth on regular pages, the sidebar is hidden but Buddpress pages still show the sidebar. any help would be awesome!

    thanks again

  41. Peter says:

    Any idea for Parament theme?
    http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/parament
    I tried,but no content I could change.Any idea?
    Thanks πŸ™‚

  42. Lucy says:

    I have now the habit to select a theme and customized.. I’m getting really good at it..I kind of new I could customize templates, but had been lazy to learn so I will pick themes that have the option on it, which reduced my selection of themes I could use..but now with this simple customization (which worked great on my site) I feel I’m an expert and can do anything I want in wordpress..thanks for sharing!!!

  43. Craig Sparkes says:

    hello, Great tutorial, very simple to follow. However I believe there is a possibility I have done something wrong! When I set the width wider then the original theme, my content hides behind where the sidebar used to be? any ideas? http://www.ukspaceforum.co.uk/?page_id=800
    If it helps at all, my theme was created with Artisteer.

    • Craig Sparkes says:

      Oh, my bad, Instead of being as it mentions in the instructions, it is actually shown as . Slightly different, a noob like myself would easily miss it!
      Thanks Anyway!

  44. Peter Daly-Dickson says:

    Genius!

    Took me a while to tweak all the settings in the stylesheet as there were also some width-limited classes.

    Your post helped me through the whole way. Brilliant! Thanks so much.

    Pete

  45. mohammad says:

    thanks man. very nice tutorial you are given thanks a lot
    cheers πŸ˜‰

  46. Victoria says:

    You are my SAVIOUR!!! I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to widen content for just a few select pages and got so frustrated I quit just to try again and quit and on and on. Then I finally came across your post (guess I just needed to type in the right keywords.) You have completely saved me and made it so incredibly simple! It worked Yahoooo!!
    Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  47. mike farber says:

    Hi:
    I just read your article on making a full width page wordpress and I went to the Elegant Themes and they look great and are what I want.
    Question: If i sign up for these themes and get one, would I still have to go thru the steps in your article or would the theme prettymuch have all that pre-configured so I do not need to go thru the steps.
    Also, I have no problem downloading to my computer then in wordprss plugins using upload to get a plugin uploaded and activated. Is this the way I get the theme on to my blog?
    Or does it require the use of FTP.
    I have never been able to get any FTP figured out and opened on my site, much less transferred any file(s). Tell me I don’t have to go the FTP route!
    Thanks in advance for your help!
    Mike Farber

    • Hey Mike,

      1. The themes from Elegant themes, most of them have Full Width page built in. You do NOT have to go through the instructions on this page.
      2. You can upload the themes just like Plugins. Go to Appearance > Themes > Install Themes > Upload Tab (go here: wp-admin/theme-install.php?tab=upload)

      Here you go: https://millionclues.com/go/ElegantThemes/

      Good luck!

      • mike says:

        Thanks for your help!
        Also, I am wondering if there are any free templates available with the full width buildt into them so I can practice uploading them and working on them as a tester before getting what I want at Elegant. I would prefer to make my mistakes on a practice site and get some experience there first.
        Mike

      • mike says:

        Real quick, I would like to make certain of something.
        In the Elegant themes will I be able to write in my pages to include the area that would otherwise have included the sidebar??
        I am practicing on the standard 2011 theme and although I changed attributes to one column (no sidebars) I cannot access that space formerly occupied by the sidebar. Very frustrating and I dont want that to be the case with another theme.
        Your help in clarifying this would be greatly appreciated!
        Mike

  48. SkunkfrΓΈ says:

    Thank you sooooo much. I used it to create a PHPBB-forum inside my wordpress-blog

  49. mike says:

    back againi.
    I’m trying to type up a list but not using the left margin. It is in the midle of the page.
    My writing is all over the place and I can’t control it. For example, say I want this list:
    1. Attend the weekly meeting of bass fishing.
    2. Pick up the kids after school.
    3. Get the laundry washed and buy a gallon
    of milk for dinner.
    ====================================================
    What I get looks more like this:
    1. Attend the weekly meeting of bass fishing.
    2. Pick up the kids after school

    3. Get the laundry washed and buy a gallon of
    milk for dinner.
    =============It is a mess! How do I control format, margins, etc.=========

    • mike says:

      PS —
      This is almost funny.
      I actually typed each line in the center of the Comment area. Only when I view it, each list is hugging the left margin.

  50. mike says:

    I am trying to follow your instructions using the This Just In theme.
    Question:
    I want to use my own header. How do I replace the photo/image that is on the top fot he theme page (ie. header)? I only see two options – widgets and menus and neither helps.
    Do I go into Header.php?
    If so, what do I change? Else, what do I do?

  51. Josh says:

    Thanks so much, I just made the full width page thanks to your site.

  52. irfan hussain says:

    This was a great tutorial. I’m trying to increase the page width of my post. I don’t want to get rid of the side bar. I just want to increase the width such that the posts and the sidebar are stretched to full screen and i want the width of the sidebar not to change. Can you please help?

  53. ganesh says:

    Excellent………………………kam ho gaya.

  54. WriteSheSaid says:

    I am using the Smartone theme and there is no sidebar mentioned in the page.php
    There is a separate sidebar php.
    Any ideas how to get it to work for this theme please?

  55. Great tutorial!

    I am trying to make a full width page WITHOUT the site navigation bar. I am using Twenty Ten. Please help!

  56. Vince Bono says:

    This worked great for me on my One Day At A Time Template. I got rid of the right column so I could use Iframes to fit my Amazon AStore on the page.

    http://www.breastcancersymbol.com/products

    Only took me about 5 minutes. Great Tutorial… Many Thanks!

    Vince Bono

  57. thanks for the help. got sorted within 10 minutes πŸ™‚

  58. alaab says:

    Man you are awesome. I needed to make a full screen page but was worry about the other pages.
    Thank you so much πŸ™‚

  59. this is very helpful thanks alot. But the theme i am using it does not contain any content class but there is something called entry. Anyways thanks for the help.

  60. Sameer says:

    How i connect full width.php to show my gallery attachment image when click to show full size in full width template with image navigation

  61. Movie Sayings says:

    quite useful it was, thanks.

  62. Sopersports says:

    dear your post is up to the mark but i can’t apply on my website please tell me, i use karmela free wp theme and i want use free space of this theme, actually i want to spread my all pages on full width

  63. Frankie says:

    You are a life saver. Thank you so much!!

  64. ΠšΡ€Ρ‹ΠΌ ΠžΡ‚Π΄Ρ‹Ρ… says:

    Thanks for your lesson, I could do it very easy for my websites

  65. Saved a lot of my time. Thanks for sharing info.

  66. Jon Armstrong says:

    Thanks for the tutorial. Probably better to use %’s now with CSS3 instead of guess the width?

  67. Sarah says:

    This is awesome! So easy to follow and worked perfectly, thanks!

  68. dilip says:

    I already have a page full width in theme files , how to enable it show in full width. Which file i need to edit to enable.

  69. Rita Evelyn Yanez says:

    Thank you so much! Exactly what I needed. Thanks for taking your time to teach this trick. God bless!

4 Pings / Trackbacks.

  1. 14 WordPress Page Templates To Make Life Easier says:

    […] (Code) […]

  2. […] 1. Find your theme’s full width page template file (eg page_fullwidth.php), within your theme’s directory, or if your theme doesn’t support one create one by following the instructions here: https://millionclues.com/problogging/wordpress-tips/make-full-width-page-in-wordpress/ […]

  3. […] learn more on how to create a Full Width page for WordPress, please refer to my very popular tutorial. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if you want me to do it for […]

  4. […] example, one of my top pages is an article on how to build a full width template for a WordPress theme. I have included affiliate links to some […]

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