How to Add Columns to a WordPress Page

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The WordPress editor is great for publishing articles.

And with the right plugins, it’s easy to insert interactive galleries, sliders, contact forms, or anything else you want. Luckily, it’s no different with adding columns.

There are actually a lot of solutions available to add columns to your WP site, but there’s one solution that I think stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Adding columns with Elementor

The problem with most plugins for adding columns to a post or page is that you won’t see the same thing in the editor as on your live site.

Imagine the frustration when you have your columns perfectly setup in your editor just to find a different display when you publish your page.

That’s why Elementor is a superior solution.

Elementor
Click here to visit the Elementor website

Elementor is an incredibly powerful customization tool. You can use it to create landing pages and entirely new page templates, but it’s also perfect for simple customizations like adding columns into posts and pages.

How to add columns

With Elementor installed, you’ll see a new button added to the editor that lets you switch to the live Elementor editor.

Edit With Elementor

You’ll recognize right away that this preview looks a lot like the native Customizer. In the menu, you’ll find a handful of “elements” that you can add into the post/page.

The very first element is the Column element which can be used to create a new multi-column section.

Elementor Columns Element

You can drag-and-drop this into the content area to create a new multi-column layout. However, there’s another even easier approach.

You’ll see after any post content a box where you can add new elements.

Elementor Add Block

If you click the plus button, you’ll be able to select from twelve different layouts.

Elementor Layout Options

Once you choose a layout, you’ll get access to a handful of styling options in the sidebar to tweak the layout to exactly the proportions you want.

Elementor Layout Styles

Now you’re probably wondering what to do with the layout. How do you add content?

It’s all easily done with Elementor.

Adding content to the columns

Click the “+” icon in any of the boxes inside the new layout section, and Elementor’s sidebar will display the Elements again. You can drag-and-drop any of the elements into the section to add it.

If you just want to display text like a regular post then select the Text Editor element.

Elementor Add Text Editor Element

The cool part about this is that you can include any element you want in any of the sections available. That means you can include images, Google Maps embeds, videos, and dozens of other types of content in any kind of column layout you want.

There are a variety of solutions available, but the awesome flexibility provided by Elementor makes it stand out in my opinion as the best option.

If you want to avoid installing any new plugins, you can add columns to WordPress posts with the new Gutenberg editor.

Conclusion

While you can find other plugins to add multi-column layouts to posts and pages, Elementor stands out because of its ease-of-use, flexibility, and huge number of customization options.

Perhaps most importantly, Elementor shows you exactly what the final product will look like. You don’t need to worry about seeing something separate in your editor from what you’ll see on the live site.

Take a look at our Elementor customization guide if you want to see more. Or you can visit the Elementor website to download it. It’s completely free, so give it a shot!

We’ve got more customization tools and tactics available in our step-by-step WordPress customization guide.

Ben Sibley
Ben Sibley
This article was written by Ben Sibley. He is a WordPress theme designer & developer, and founder of Compete Themes.