How to Add a News Ticker in WordPress

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News tickers sometimes referred to as slides are located at the bottom of most television news networks to highlight breaking news, daily trends, etc. You can use a news ticker on your WordPress website to highlight special deals, popular posts, or anything else. In this article, we will show you how to add a rotating or scrolling news ticker in WordPress.

Video Tutorial

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First thing you need to do is install and activate the Ditty News Ticker plugin. Upon activation, the plugin adds a News Ticker menu item in your WordPress admin. Bring your mouse over to the menu item and click on the Add New link to add a news ticker.

On the next screen, you will have the ability give this particular news ticker a name, ticker text and link. For each ticker, you can add as many ticker items as you like. If you want to add another ticker item, then press the green + button to add the next item on the ticker. Once you are done adding ticker items, scroll down to Ticker Mode. There are three different ticker modes available. Scroll, rotate, and list. The scroll mode is the default one because it is the most commonly used in television networks. Rotate is another good option if you want to show one ticker at a time.

Adding news ticker items

If you want to adjust the behavior of the news ticker, then scroll down to the Scroll settings panel. This panel allows you to configure scroll speed and dimensions. You can also choose the spacing between each ticker items and pause items when a user brings their mouse over the ticker.

News ticker scroll settings

The plugin generates a shortcode as well as a PHP function for each news ticker you create. You can either use the shortcode inside a post, page, sidebar widget, or you can directly insert the PHP function in your theme files.

News ticker shortcode and php function

Once you insert the ticker shortcode or PHP function, then it should work. We hope that this article helped you add a news ticker to your WordPress website. Would you use a news ticker on your website, or do you rather prefer our sticky floating footer bar? Let us know by leaving a comment below.