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. This is 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 will 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. It typically shows 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 the content is always scrolling, you can also use tickers to show lots of information in a limited space.

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

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

How to Add a Scrolling News Ticker in WordPress

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

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

Upon activation, you need to go to Ditty » Add New in the WordPress dashboard and then click the ‘Add Default’ button.

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, similar to a website banner. For example, you could let shoppers know about a scheduled sale or recent posts.

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

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

You can also add a link title, mark the URL as nofollow, and more.

To make the most out of the ticker, you may want to add multiple news items by clicking on the ‘Update Item Settings’ button.

The preview will now update to show the item you just created.

To go ahead and add another item to the ticker, click on the ‘Add Item’ button.

You can now click ‘Add Default’ and create the item by following the process described above.

Simply repeat these steps to add more items to the ticker.

When you are happy with your items, you may want to change the order in which they appear in the ticker. To do so, simply grab the item you want to change and drag and drop it into a new position.

By default, Ditty shows your items in a list.

Since you want to create a scrolling ticker, click on the ‘Display’ tab.

On this screen, click the ‘Change Type’ link.

In the popup that appears, select ‘Ticker’ and then click ‘Update Type’.

You can now change how the ticker looks and acts on your WordPress website.

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

You can also choose between different styles for the ticker container, items, titles, and more. Most of these settings are self-explanatory, so it’s worth going through them to see what changes you want to make.

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

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

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.

Once you have 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 highlight new posts for returning visitors or see our expert pick of the best WordPress sidebar tricks to get maximum results.

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