Do you want to display consistent header and footer content sitewide and across all your landing pages?
With our new Headers & Footers feature in Thrive Architect and Thrive Theme Builder, you now have an easy way to do so!
In this post you will discover how this feature works and how to get the most out of it.
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Headers, Footers & Other Global Elements
Thrive Architect has already had a feature for templates and Symbols for a while. Headers & Footers have a lot in common with Symbols, so you'll find them grouped together in the Thrive Dashboard:
If you aren't familiar with Symbols yet, take a look at this post to get acquainted. In one important aspect, headers and footers are the same as Symbols: when you edit them in one place, they update everywhere.
Templates & Layouts
As usual, we're not only providing you with a new feature, we've also added ready-made templates for you to choose from.
Our starter set of templates. More to be added soon.
You can choose and modify any of these templates to suit your needs. Of course, you can also build your own templates, completely from scratch. And because you have all of the features in Thrive Architect at your disposal, you can create any layout and design you can imagine.
Header Features
Headers come with a few specific features that give you more control over how the header behaves on a page.
The first determines whether your header is placed above the content of your page or whether it covers the content. The "cover" option is useful for transparent headers such as this one:
The second determines the scroll behavior of the header. The options are pretty self explanatory. You can make your header stick to the top of the viewport while scrolling or you can make it disappear on scroll-down and appear on scroll-up.
Update: Headers In Thrive Theme Builder
With the March 2020 release of Thrive Theme Builder, we’ve made it even easier to build, design, and rapidly deploy custom headers for your WordPress site in almost any conceivable way.
You can still find your custom headers in the Thrive Dashboard under Global Elements, or load up individual custom headers on a specific page directly within Thrive Architect, but now we’ve made it easier to create and edit global site-wide headers, especially during the initial stages of a new site buildout.
When installing Thrive Theme Builder on a new site, you’ll be given the option to walk through a 10 step “site building wizard,” in which creating and setting your global header happens in Step # 2.
From this screen, click on “Select a Header,” and you’ll be able to choose from one of dozens of header templates that you can customize, or you can build one from scratch.
Additionally, with Thrive Theme Builder, you can easily set and use diverse headers across your site for different use cases.
For example, if you want one header to display on every single blog post, but a different header to display on your main website pages, you can build these directly into post and page templates, so when you create a new blog post it will already come with your desired header pre-loaded.
Help Us Make This Feature Even Better
We hope you enjoy this first release of our Headers & Footers feature. We are working on a few updates to this feature already, including more templates. Also, you may have noticed that we stealth-released some feature improvements for the custom menu element a while ago. In our next update, we will enhance this element further and make it easier to use and customize.
We'd love to hear from you: what additions do you want to see, to make the Headers & Footers feature even better? Let us know by leaving a comment below and by voting on the suggestions you'd most like to see implemented.
Hi Shane. This feature will be very useful for me as I plan to redesign my homepage and some landing pages soon, but how does the menu appear on mobile? It would be good if instead of displaying the menu right away there would be a button to press.
Also, i would love to have an option to add a search button. Something like what GeneratePress has in their theme.
yes, a search button would be awesome!
I’d like a search button too!
Thank you for your comment, Ion.
The custom menu automatically switches between a “menu” and a “icon” style at medium or small screen sizes.
Search: that’s something we already have in progress. 🙂
Yes… a search button.
Love this!
Nothing to add for now. Just to say keep up the great work!
Thank you!
this is amazing. I think my biggest problem with thrive architect was mobile navigation. Does this plugin solve that?
It depends on what you mean, exactly. The new custom menu element has more options for optimizing mobile navigation, for sure.
I will check out the features. Its been a long time since I checked it out, just because I ended up using default theme’s header and footer and build landing page that way.
My problem was it was really hard to customize the way mobile navigation would work. The icon itself is ok to certain extent. But the when you click on it and the way it drops down was quite ugly and hard to customize.
It was also not possible to add click to call phone number element in the mobile navigation. Its achievable in certain themes.
I think if it is possible to add different icons for mobile menu, effect on that icon when you click on it (like it turning to X, is pretty common effect), and change the way the mobile navigation will drop down, like coming out from the side, dropping down in a style (pushing whole page down, overlaying on the top of the page etc.)
And finally if we can add that click to call button on to mobile navigation, that would just be cherry on the top.
We have improved the customizability of the mobile menu quite a lot and in a few weeks, we have a new release which I think should solve all the issues you’ve described here.
Looking really, good but I wish we could try the new theme customizer before I do much work converting my regular pages to “landing pages” with header menues and footers. Is the July date 25th pushed?
Hi Sven, Beta has been released to those who signed up for it. And you’ll be able to use those same headers and footers within the theme so no lost work 😉
Hanne, when the theme will be available for purchase? Any estimate?
No estimate yet
Hi Hanne. I’m sure I signed up for the Beta version but have not received any info since. Please advise? Thanks.
Depending on when you signed up, you might not have been accepted yet.
Hi Hanne, did all persons who were interested in the Beta version and signed up for it get the release?
Because I signed up for it and didn’t get any notification.
We invited applicants from a first round a while back. Depending on when you signed up, we may not have gotten around to your application yet.
I missed info about the need to sign up in the promo-video, found in only on the expected day of release, but have not seen any info after the signup 🙁
Hi Sven,
We might do a new batch of approvals over the coming days.
How about headers that change depending on whether someone is logged in or not? For example, on a WordPress membership site, it would be nice to have one header that displays for logged-in members, and another that displays for visitors.
Thanks for your comment, Brandon! We will take this into consideration for a future release.
Looking forward to different headers/navigations for logged-in and logged-out. This is an essential feature for a membership site. Isn’t it a standard WP feature? Since you already build it in Apprentice I guess it’s coming soon 🙂
Thank you for bringing this up.
Hi Shane, awesome feature. I’m loving everything you and the team are pushing out. One thing that I’d like to see, either on some of the templates or as an element is pre-formatted social icons. I’ve found that it can be very difficult to get small, sleek social icons, with the proper spacing just using the Architect editor. I think it’s because of the limitations of the minimum distance between column items. I’m sure there’s some kind of workaround for this, but I haven’t taken the time to figure it out, so I just end up removing that type of element. Thanks!
Hi Alex,
Thank you for your feedback on this! Indeed, there are better ways to construct a small line of social icons, but they aren’t as obvious as using columns.
We will find a way to make this easier for you.
I’m happy to hear this is being worked on! It has been driving me crazy that I can’t have attractive social media follow icons like I’ve had on every different theme I’ve used for years and years before Thrive.
Hello, I think this new feature of the thrive architect is very good. Can I use headers and footers created with this function as header and footer of the whole web, even with blog posts? using same thrive theme?
Thanks for your comment, Daniel!
You can’t apply this to your whole website yet. But we may add this as a future feature.
I haven’t been creating landing pages lately, but looks like an interesting feature. Probably will use it in the future.
I think the biggest feature that I would like to see is the ability to override the default WordPress header on the whole site without having to edit every single page and convert it to a landing page and then apply the header.
I think this is coming with the theme builder Christina (https://thrivethemes.com/theme-first-look/)
Thank you for your comment!
We may be able to make this feature available in a future release.
Hi Shane,
This feature is a really good idea. It’ll save some time when creating a website.
However, are you planning on adding template blocks for the various parts of a website? This will rely help make creating whole or part websites very fast.
Thanks.
We do plan on building such blocks, yes.
Can this be used with blog post pages?
I don’t see why not. You just need to create your blog and then design it in the TA and paste your content. You can use some of the templates.
Not yet, no. We will see if we can add this functionality in the future.
Thanks Shane, really great improvelemnts!
The next logical step is to replace the header & footer of my template to your header & footer, to give an consistent look to my site.
So it would be great if I can use the headers, footers and the symbols as a shortcode to put anywhere on my ‘non thrive’ pages.
Thanks for your suggestion! We’re looking into this as a feature to add.
Actually… i do have a suggestion.
i love this website’s collapse on down-scroll, open on up-scroll header
https://www.meliorclinics.co.uk/flexible-affordable-payment-plans/
Could you add something like that?
(I also love how the quick CTAs are available from the header… but I think that can all already be done in thrive headers).
Keep up the great work!
that’s cool. It’s a partially sticky header.
This is something we want to build, yes. As you can imagine, it’s a bit complicated to make this available and keep everything customizable. But we’re working on it. 🙂
This is a great feature, will be very helpful. I’m assuming this doesn’t fix the issue where the blog doesn’t look like the rest of the site? That seems to be a feature that is coming with the new theme builder or is that something that this feature improves?
That will be the domain of the theme builder, yes.
Shane I cannot wait for the theme builder, it will truly change the landscape of options. Is there a planned release date for this yet?
Hi Shane,
I’m truly glad that this feature is becoming a reality and I’m confident it will distinguish Thrive Architect even more 🙂
Now, I’ve noticed immediately an issue with UTM-8 carfig is not being respected. I have a website in Albanian, so the UTM-8 character set is necessary to be respected. However it is not respecting it in this instance: https://sfidabiznesi.com/email-marketing-mailchimp/ is there an easy solution to this?
Also, would love to see a bit more control over the secondary menus, which you mentioned in your video is coming as well.
Many thanks,
Elvis
Has anyone been able to see the issue in my link? In Albanian there are special characters like ‘ç’ and ‘ë’ which need the UTF-8 charset to display correctly. Any suggestions?
Thanks for reporting this issue, Elvis! We’ll get that fixed as soon as possible.
Very powerful new feature! I’d like to be able to add tracking code to the new footer element (required by Kartra).
Hello Peter,
Tracking can and should be added on the code level of the page and not associated with a specific visual element of the page. For our landing pages, you can use this feature and for regular posts and pages, you can use a plugin like this one.
Couldn’t tell from the video but can you bring in an existing WordPress menu instead of building one from scratch? Also in the footer can we have a Copyright element that brings in the year shortcode?
“Also in the footer can we have a Copyright element that brings in the year shortcode?” – Great idea!
Yes, you can use a WordPress menu. When you insert a menu element, you can choose between a custom menu (as shown in the video) or any of your already saved wp menus.
This is a great question. I found out how to do this once and it took me a full 3 days to figure it out again. It is possible to use the existing WP menu. In the ‘Thrive Dashboard’ window, locate Theme square icon you are using. Click on the upper right menu (three dots), click ‘page templates’ and then choose the pages you want, and it will publish those pages with the existing WP menus. While this info is in the forums or help areas, it’s crazy hard to find.
It’s beautiful. I wonder if I can create different pages (I mean static pages of my website that are always there (not just sales landing pages) I’m not sure if by landing page you mean all the pages or just those sales landing pages?
But my idea is that certain pages could have a custom menu. This is especially relevant if I have more than one niche. For instance, I can optimize a landing page for single women clients and have the header with the menu that’s relevant only to them.
Similarly, I can have a landing page for teen girl services and have a menu that’s only relevant to their parents and them. Would this override the menu of the theme?
Thank you for your feedback! We are looking at what we can do to create targeting/filtering options, so you can display different headers on different pages.
Right now, you can create multiple headers and assign them to specific landing pages. There’s no way to target specific headers to specific content, sitewide, though.
Great, but why those, like many other features (ex: global typography) is only available for landing pages? Why can’t we create, for example, a header for the entire site (overwriting the theme’s one) like Elementor for example does? I prefer TA over it and you are constantly adding more “widgets/elements” to it that are better, but that’s the only drawback… If I want a specific header that my theme can’t create, I have two choices:
1- change theme;
2- turn all my pages to landing pages to be able to use TA’s header throughout the site…
That would be nice if, like Elementor, we could create a header for the entire site (i.e. kind of theme builder)…
Thank you for your feedback, Nelson.
The main reason it’s only on landing pages right now is because this way, we could already release a workable version of this feature. Adding options for making it site-wide is planned, but will take some more time to complete.
Hi Shane,
I agree with Nelson.
I can imagine that very few people use landing pages for their entire website. At the moment I prefer to work from scratch and use only single elements of landing pages.
Why I don’t create a complete website consisting of the landing page templates has to do with the mobile appearance of the menu.
The current mobile menu is far from looking nice – especially if the website has many subpages.
Custom CSS gives me a lot more possibilities to design the menu for mobile devices.
For me Thrivethemes will be perfect if we could design the header and footer for all pages – not only for landing pages.
When will you launch a functional and nice drop-down menu for tablet and smartphone?
But I don’t just want to bitch. You guys are doing a great job!
Cheers,
Marion
Thank you for your feedback!
We are working on making headers and footers more widely available. We’ve also been working on improvements for the menu element, which will be included in our next release.
Hi Shane – are site-wide header and footers available yet? (i.e. not just for landing pages)
Cheers,
Jason
No, we don’t have this feature yet.
Hi Nelson – do you know if this feature is available yet?
Great addition. I’d like to be able to customize the header when using it with a series of posts so that I could add an item like ‘NEXT’ that would like to the next in a series of articles. I wouldn’t want it to go throughout all the posts – only those that include a series of articles. Maybe a place to click ‘only this time’? or ‘only this header’?
Nice feature. What happens if I implement a header in a page, and the site already has a global header from the site theme. Does this supersede the theme header?
Another comment is about the term “landing page” used extensively in your video. Isn’t a landing page supposed to not have any distractions? Why would you add a header to a landing page and violate this principle? Why not to say “web page” instead of “landing page”?
You can have different header on every page.
About the landing page…If the header has only a call-to-action that you want to your visitor to do, I think it might work pretty well. If not sure, just a/b test it 🙂
there is certain landing page that needs with header on it. For instance, when using google ads, a landing page needs to have a header. Google likes it..
this is a great feature to have for me..
Many themes offer option to hide the built in header on specific pages using just a check box. If not, you can use a simple CSS code to do that… usually something like: .header{display:none;}
Thanks for your questions, Javier!
Right now, we don’t have a feature for replacing your theme header with Thrive Architect headers yet. The feature can only be used on landing pages at the moment.
The idea for a landing page is usually to keep distractions to a minimum, yes. Adding a header with minimal navigation or adding a footer with navigation can help for certain cases, like making a page AdWords compliant, for example.
Shane, still not sure why you say “landing page” for everything. Even your answer says “landing pages” again. It seems that the term is over-used to the point that it’s confusing now. Wouldn’t it be better to say “web pages”, either landing or not?
From your answer it seems that this feature doesn’t apply to a home page, nor to a sales page, nor to an about page, nor to a thank you page, nor to a contact page, etc. It applies ONLY to a landing page, which by the way is not supposed to have any distractions.
A landing page is any page specifically constructed to have visitors land on and move them to the next step in a conversion process. That includes lead generation pages, sales pages and so on, but can also include all kinds of other pages. It depends on your business and conversion funnel. There are other pages that are distinctly not landing pages such as a category page, navigation page, search results page etc.
A page including “distractions” doesn’t disqualify it from being a landing page. It’s about the purpose of the page more than about whether it has links on it or not.
Another great improvement. Thanks.
One suggestion regarding the footer. Due to design I mostly use 2 footers right now. One as a major footer including address, logo etc and a 2nd mini footer at the very bottom, which only contains links ot legal pages.
They are currently 2 separate background sections (with 2 different background colours). What would be even more comfortable would be a footer with a kind of split like having 2 background sections in 1.
Regarding the upcoming improvement of the custom menue: Currently when you have styled your menu items and then add a new page this page’s new menue item does not come up in the identical design like the previously existing menu items. So you have to adpat it manually.
However, the most important improvement of the custom menue for website users would be the feature, which allows to highlight/mark the current (selected) page, i.e. if a page of the custom menue is chosen/active, it should be highlighted as being active in the menue (e.g. by another colour or by being underlined etc.). In other words the custom menue does not come with good orientation for the user in terms of telling them where they are right now.
Thanks.
Lars
Thank you for your feedback, Lars!
You can add multiple background sections into the footer (or the header) already. 🙂
And we will create a “current page” highlight in a future release as well.
Allow logo to show half on half off header bar, be able to customize shape of headers and to place the header anywhere on the page, ie below a hero image or video
You can already place the logo partially outside the header. You can use negative margins to accomplish this.
Regarding the header placement, we’ll see what we can do.
I am a newer user of Thrive themes. I have been enjoying everything that I have seen. Yes some little work arounds but nothing that stops anyone in their tracks. This is very helpful addition. I am going to the test page before converting Global headers. The versatility of static, sticky and up-down scrolling of the header is a very nice feature. Thanks for all the great updates and the tech talks. Looking forward to a couple other features you mentioned.
Thank you for your comment, Gary!
Here’s a thought: I’m pretty new to wordpress design and Thrive has been an important tool for me. Right now I am working on adding a page and updating my theme navigation and I have a need to categorize pulldown elements – so there is a top level “Solutions” pulldown that I want to add a subcategory of “Industry Verticals” with some solution sub elements under that category. So, essentially I need three levels including the top element. Thanks for this feature! Looking forward to seeing it roll out across the board.
This is a very good feature. I have been waiting for such a thing for long time. I have a question. Does it apply also to posts? or only pages?
Currently, only to landing pages. We are working to extend the feature with more options though.
Awesome! thank!
Glad you like this new feature, Diego!