The return of the sidebar
Everyone spent a decade removing them. Now they are back, and the reasons are better than last time.
The sidebar died around 2014. Screens got narrower, mobile traffic passed desktop, and a column of links down the left edge looked like a relic from a time when websites had visitor counters. Designers stripped them out and put everything behind a hamburger.
Then the screens got wider again. Not phones — those settled. But the laptop most people work on is now 1440 pixels or more across, and a centred column of text on a screen that size leaves two empty margins the width of a paperback. We spent ten years optimising for the small end and stopped looking at the large one.
What came back is not the old sidebar. The 2010 version was a dumping ground: category lists, tag clouds, an archive by month, three ad slots and a photo of the author. The new one carries one job. On documentation sites it is navigation, because people move between pages constantly and a hamburger costs them a click every time. On long articles it is a table of contents that tracks where you are. On dashboards it is the primary switch between views.
Everyone spent a decade removing them. Now they are back, and the reasons are better than last time.
The test is whether the thing in the sidebar gets used more than once per visit. Navigation on a docs site: yes, dozens of times. An author photo: no, never. If it is used once, it belongs in the flow of the page, where it will be read, rather than parked in a column the eye learns to skip.
There is a measurable version of this. Watch a session recording of someone using a documentation site with a hamburger menu. They open it, scan, close it, read, open it again. Six or seven times in a ten-minute session, each one costing about two seconds and a small break in concentration. Put the same links in a persistent column and the cost drops to zero.
Where it still fails is the middle width. Between about 900 and 1100 pixels a sidebar squeezes the content column into something cramped, and that is exactly the width of a browser window that is not quite maximised — which is how a lot of people work. Collapse it there. A sidebar that survives to 900 pixels and then folds into a button is doing the right thing at both ends.
Editor · Rotterdam
Spent nine years designing for newspapers before moving to the web, which she still describes as “a newspaper that argues back”. Writes about type and layout, mostly.