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How to Add a Printer Friendly Option to Your WordPress Posts

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Are you looking to add a printer friendly option to your WordPress posts?

Users often want to print the articles that they find interesting. By default, many WordPress themes aren’t optimized for print. Instead of printing just the content, they would force users to print your entire website layout including graphics, colors, sidebars, and even ads.

In this article, we will show you how to add a printer friendly option to your WordPress posts.

How to Add a Printer Friendly Option to Your WordPress Posts

Why Add a Printer Friendly Option to Your WordPress Posts?

You often get unexpected results when printing from a WordPress blog. When a user wants to print an article they found helpful on your site, they will often get a printout of your entire site layout, including all the images, sidebars, headers, and menus.

This looks unattractive, wastes paper, and is difficult to read.

Fortunately, it doesn’t always happen. Some WordPress themes come with a separate CSS stylesheet for printing. This stylesheet is used to print just the content the user wants.

You can see how your WordPress site looks when printed by viewing a print preview. To do this, you need to press CTRL+P (Command+P on Mac) when looking at a post.

Print Preview Will Show You How Your Theme Handles Printing

If the print preview shows your website’s header or sidebar, then you can add a printer friendly option on your WordPress site.

Doing this will add an on-screen print icon that will encourage your users to print and produce an attractive, readable printout of your content.

Let’s take a look at how to add a printer friendly option to your WordPress posts.

How to Add a Printer Friendly Option to Your WordPress Posts

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Print, PDF, Email by PrintFriendly plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, ‘Print’ and ‘PDF’ icons will automatically be added to the bottom of each post and page on your website. These will create an attractive printout or PDF version of the content you are viewing.

You can customize the plugin by navigating to Settings » Print Friendly & PDF.

At the top of the page, users who are paying for Pro features can activate their accounts. To use the free version, just scroll past this section.

Pro Users Can Activate Their Account

When you come to the ‘Select content using’ section, you should leave the default ‘WP Template’ option selected.

If you find that the ‘Print’ and ‘PDF’ icons are not being displayed on your website, then you should come back and try one of the other options.

Leave the Default WP Template Option Unless You Can't See the Print Button on Your Site

Next, you can choose the button style to display on your website. These are available with different labels and color options. Some styles include buttons for PDF and email, but these options will be offered when previewing the page no matter which style you choose.

You may need to experiment with a few button styles to find one that looks best on your site.

Select a Button Style That Looks Good on Your Site

The same is true of the button position. You can place the button above or below your content and align the button to the left, right, center, or have no alignment.

You may need to try a few alignment options to find one that looks best.

You Can Display the Button Before or After Your Content

In the next section, you choose where to display the print button on your website.

By default, it will be displayed on all posts and pages. However, there are also checkboxes for the homepage, category pages, and taxonomy pages.

Choose the Pages Where You Wish the Button to Appear

You could show the print button only for specific categories by entering them in the box labeled ‘Specific categories to show on.’ Simply click that box, and then you can select the categories you want from a drop-down menu.

Advanced users can also add the button directly to their theme templates using a code snippet, or add a shortcode anywhere within a post, page, or widget-ready area.

To finish up, make sure you click the ‘Save Options’ button at the bottom of the page to store your settings.

Click the Save Options Button to Store Your Settings

You can now visit your website to see your print icon in action.

Here’s how it looks on our demo website.

Preview of the Printer Friendly Button

When you click the ‘Print’ button, a preview page will appear that shows you exactly how the page will look when it is printed. However, this isn’t simply a preview page. You can also remove any content you don’t want to print.

For example, when you hover your mouse over the date a trash icon will appear. Clicking it will remove the date from the preview. Simply do the same to remove the image and anything else you don’t want to print.

You Can Preview and Adjust the Page Before Printing

When you’re ready, simply click the ‘Print’ icon to print the page. Alternatively, you can click the ‘PDF’ button to download a PDF version of the page or the ‘Email’ button to email the PDF.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to add a printer-friendly option to your WordPress posts. You may also want to learn the right way to create an email newsletter, or check out our list of proven ways to make money online blogging with WordPress.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

13 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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  2. facebook says

    I have one specific page on my site I am trying to get to print without anything around it. I installed the plugin did all of your steps have the print page logo and link. I would like it to just print cleanly the contents of my page with nothing else around it.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      You would want to check with the support for the plugin you are using for how they exclude certain content from the printer-friendly page :)

      Admin

  3. Brooke Favorat says

    This is exactly what I needed and was so excited to see this information… but sadly the plugin recommended has been closed :( I have no clue about code and all other print plugins are Greek to me. Please help!

    • WPBeginner Support says

      The second option is still available but thanks for letting us know, we’ll be sure to look into updating this article

      Admin

    • Brooke says

      Just wanted to update in case anyone else would like to know…the plugin BWS PDF & Print is great and has been the solution for me

  4. Lineisy Kosenkova says

    Have only just started looking into being able to print WordPress posts. Glad I stumbled onto your site and these useful tips. . This is a great post. Tom, do you have any theme suggestions that play nicely with print stylesheets?

  5. Mark Klinefelter says

    My favorite is PrintFriendly. Easy to install on any page or post and can be easily removed from any individual page if desired. It also comes with a pdf tool. I use it on my live site and it is a very attractive proposition.

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