How to Add a Scrolling News Ticker in WordPress

Do you want to add a scrolling news ticker to your WordPress site?

Television networks often use news tickers to highlight important stories. They’re a great way to get the visitor’s attention, so you might want to add a news ticker to your website and then highlight special deals, popular posts, and other important content.

In this article, we’ll show you how to add a scrolling news ticker in WordPress.

What Is a Scrolling News Ticker?

A news ticker is a single line of text that scrolls continuously across the screen. They typically show current news items, sporting results, live financial and currency information, and weather information.

This is similar to how you might use a sticky floating footer bar.

Tickers are a great way to display small snippets of information in an eye-catching way. Since it’s always scrolling, you can also use tickers to show quite a lot of information in a limited space on your WordPress blog.

For example, you might use a news ticker to display your best performing posts, announce an upcoming sale, or share other useful infomration.

With that being said, let’s look at how to add a scrolling news ticker to your WordPress site.

How to Add a Scrolling News Ticker in WordPress

The best way to add a scrolling news ticker to your website is by using the Ditty News Ticker plugin. This plugin allows you to add moving, scrolling, and sliding content to your website, and then change the direction, spacing, speed, and styling of the animation.

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Ditty News Ticker plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to News Tickers » Add New in the WordPress dashboard. The plugin will show a sample ticker with some default content.

Note: Want to create a list or slider instead? Then simply click on the ‘Display’ button to access these options.

To customize the default scrolling ticker, hover your mouse over the ‘This is a sample item’ text. Then, click on the ‘Edit item’ button, which looks like a small pencil.

You can now create the first item in the ticker. In the ‘Content’ box simply type in the text that you want to show on the scrolling ticker.

Here, you might make an announcement or share some useful information. For example, you could let shoppers know about a scheduled sale or share a coupon code.

You can also add links to the news item, so people can easily visit the page or post featured in the ticker.

To do this, just add aa URL to the ‘Link’ field.

To make the most out of the ticker, you may want to add multiple news items.

To add more items, just click on the left-pointing arrow.

Then, click on the ‘Add new item’ button.

You can now add more items to the ticker by following the same process described above.

When you’re happy with your items, click on the ‘Display’ tab.

Then, hover over ‘Default ticker’ and click on ‘Edit Display’ when it appears.

Here, you can change how the ticker looks and acts.

This includes changing the scroll direction, speed, and the spacing between ticker items.

You can also choose between different styles for the ticker container, items, title, and more.

Just scroll to the bottom of the panel and then click on any of these options to expand it.

Most of these settings are self-explanatory, so it’s worth going through them to see what changes you want to make.

When you’re happy with how the ticker is set up, click on the ‘Save Ditty’ button.

After that you’re ready to add the ticker to your site using a shortcode. To get this shortcode, go ahead and click on the ‘Settings’ button.

Now, copy the value in the ‘Shortcode’ field.

With that done, you can add the shortcode to any page, post, or widget-ready area. For more information on how to place the shortcode, please see our guide on how to add a shortcode in WordPress.

Once you’ve done that, just update or publish your changes to make the ticker live on your WordPress website.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to add a scrolling news ticker in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to increase your blog traffic, or check out our list of proven ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.

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