How to Add a Printer Friendly Option to Your WordPress Posts

Sometimes, your readers might want to print out articles they find useful.

But many WordPress themes aren’t set up for printing. They often include extra elements like graphics, colors, sidebars, and even ads. This can make printed pages look cluttered and use up more ink than necessary.

Luckily, you can fix this by adding a printer-friendly option to your WordPress posts. This makes it easy for readers to print just the content they need.

In this article, I’ll show you how to set it up so that your posts look clean and professional when printed.

Why Add a Printer-Friendly Option to Your WordPress Posts?

Printing directly from a WordPress blog often yields unexpected results, such as printing the entire layout instead of just the content of the post. They will probably get every image, sidebar, header, and menu.

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

Fortunately, this doesn’t always happen. Some WordPress themes do come with a separate CSS stylesheet for printing, which prints only the content the user wants.

You can view the print preview by pressing CTRL+P on Windows or Command+P on Mac to check how your WordPress site looks when printed.

If the print preview shows your website’s header, footer, and sidebar, then you can add a printer-friendly option to your WordPress site.

Doing this will add an on-screen print icon that lets users know they can have an attractive, readable printout of your content.

Let’s see 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 from your WordPress dashboard.

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.

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.

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.

The same applies to where you place the button. You can place the button above or below your content and align it to the left, right, or center, or have no alignment.

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

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.

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.

Don’t forget to click ‘Save Options’ at the bottom to save your changes.

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

Here’s how it looks on our demo website.

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.

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.

Bonus Tip: More Blogging Hacks

Adding a print icon to your blog posts is just one way to make things easier for your readers. There are some other cool tricks you can try, too.

For instance, you could add a ‘Load More Posts’ button. This lets visitors keep scrolling through your content without leaving the page, which helps keep them engaged.

You can also show your upcoming scheduled posts. Letting readers know what’s coming next can build excitement for your future content.

Lastly, you can add tooltips to your posts and pages. These give extra details when someone hovers over a word or phrase, keeping things clear without cluttering the page.

For more tutorials, you can check out our ultimate guide on how to start a blog.

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to add a printer-friendly option to your WordPress posts. Next up, you may also want to learn how to display related posts or how to display most commented posts in WordPress.

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