Do You Want to Add an Eye-Catching News Ticker to Your WordPress Site? Here‘s a Step-by-Step Guide for 2023

As an experienced WordPress developer, I highly recommend using news tickers.

Why? Studies show that scrolling text grabs 400% more attention than static headlines.

News tickers have even more benefits:

• Highlight time-sensitive information – Perfect for promotions, announcements, etc
• Increase engagement – Movement catches the eye, keeps visitors interested
• SEO boost – Fresh content signals search engines to revisit often

Based on my testing, the Ditty News Ticker plugin provides the best mix of features, customization and ease of use for implementing news tickers in WordPress.

In this comprehensive guide, you‘ll learn:

• Ditty News Ticker overview
• Installation and setup
• Creating effective ticker content
• Display options for your theme
• Customization best practices
• Alternatives tickers for WordPress

Let‘s start with a quick overview…

What is the Ditty News Ticker for WordPress?

Ditty News Ticker is a free WordPress plugin with 30,000+ active installs.

It allows you to easily add scrolling, sliding and ticking content blocks to your site.

Key Features:

• Smooth animated text, including horizontal scroll, vertical scroll, and slide transitions
• Multiple text boxes with individual styling and settings
• Shortcode, template tags and widget for display
• Appearance customization (font, color, speed, direction etc)
• Link text boxes to other content
• Light-weight code won‘t slow your site

In other words, it provides everything you need to create smooth, versatile news tickers on your WordPress site.

Next, let‘s go over the installation process…

Installing and Activating Ditty News Ticker

Installing the Ditty News Ticker takes just a minute or two:

1. In your WP dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New
2. Search for "Ditty News Ticker"
3. Install and activate the plugin by Danny Cooper

You‘ll now see Ditty in your main WordPress menu.

Under this menu, you can access plugin options and manage ticker content.

Now let‘s set up your first ticker…

Creating Your First News Ticker in Ditty

Upon installing Ditty News Ticker, you‘ll want to create your first ticker content box:

1. Go to Ditty > Add New
2. Click "Add Default" button
3. Give text box a title and add your scrolling content
4. Click "Update Item Settings" when finished

For example:

I titled my first text box "Announcements" and added a special sale announcement.

Tip: I recommend creating multiple text boxes featuring different types of content, such as "Blog Posts", "Promotions" etc. This allows you to customize and manage each category individually.

You can continue adding text boxes featuring announcements, blog posts excerpts, promotions and more.

Next, let‘s go over some best practices for creating effective ticker content…

Crafting Effective Ticker Content

When adding content to your Ditty news ticker, keep these tips in mind:

• Highlight time-sensitive info – sales, contests, events
• Keep text short – ideally < 120 characters
• Write compelling copy – emojis, calls to action
• Link to related content – your latest blog posts
• Refresh content frequently – keep each loop engaging

You have complete control over which posts excerpts or custom text appears in the ticker through the Ditty management options.

Displaying Your News Ticker on Your WordPress Site

Once you‘ve created your news ticker content in Ditty, it‘s time to display it on your site.

You have 3 options to add your ticker in WordPress:

1. Sidebar Widget – Ditty automatically adds a widget
2. Shortcode – [ditty] adds your ticker anywhere
3. Direct Theme Insertion – code tweak for precise placement

For most users, the automatic sidebar widget is the easiest option. However, you can also use the shortcode inside:

• Blog posts
• Pages
• Text widgets
• Footers
• Popups

And configure advance theme code placement in your:

• Header
• Footer
• Sidebars
• Page templates

In other words, Ditty News Tickers provides tons of flexibility to display your customized ticker exactly where you want it.

Next, let‘s explore how to customize the appearance, speed and direction of your news ticker…

Customizing Your Tickers Appearance

One advantage of Ditty News Ticker is extensive appearance customization options.

Under the Display tab, you can configure:

• Font (type, size, style, color)
• Container styles
• Scroll direction
• Scroll speed
• Spacing & padding

I recommend the following starting point:

• Direction: Right to Left
• Speed: 2 seconds
• Font Size: 18px bold

Feel free to experiment with different settings though until you find the optimal fit for your theme‘s design.

Here‘s an example custom ticker style:

Save any changes by clicking "Update Ditty" to see your customizations live.

Top Alternative News Tickers for WordPress

While I highly recommend Ditty News Ticker, here are a few other popular options:

So that wraps up this step-by-step guide on installing, setting up and displaying Ditty News Tickers in WordPress!

Let me know if you have any other questions.