Last week, there was a story making the rounds that link-in-bio company Snipfeed had raised $5.5 million in their seed round. I read the article hoping to understand what these companies are doing that would command such investment and, honestly, I still don’t know.
But it got me curious enough to explore alternatives, and along the way, I discovered that you can create a link-in-bio page on WordPress! For those of you looking for an alternative to these pricey services, try this option instead.
How to create the “link-in-bio” page
You’ll need a WordPress.com account in order to do this, but you can create an account for free. There are more advanced paid plans, but if you don’t plan to do any e-commerce or advanced website customization, the free account will probably do for your purposes. You can always upgrade later if you change your mind.
Once you’ve created your account and are in the WordPress admin dashboard, navigate to Pages < Add a New Page. You’ll see a variety of pre-made templates come up. Click on the “Link-in-Bio” category. There are 6 pre-defined layouts: 3 standard link-in-bio pages, About layout with article links, About layout with product links, and About layout with a video.
Once you pick your page template, customizing it is a breeze. Click on the element you want to change and the block’s options and settings come up. For example, clicking the image will reveal a toolbar with a “Replace” option. Click on that and you’ll get different options for selecting your image. In the right-hand panel, you’ll also see settings for the block itself. Take a look at this panel because you’ll have additional customization options here like the image style and dimensions. Click through the various elements and update block-by-block. It’s that easy!
Buttons
The only other thing I’ll call out is the buttons because there was a nitpicky thing that was driving me crazy and you might encounter it too. When you click on the button elements, in the Block panel, you’ll reveal all your customization options: Button styles, typography, border, text color, background color, width, and advanced settings. For the color setting, although you can change the background color from the Block settings, you can’t change the color on hover. In the image below, I’ve selected pink as my background color for the top button, but this screenshot shows the button while I hovered my mouse over it, and you’ll see it’s green.
No joke, I dug into every single settings screen in WP and there was none for this option. At first, I tried to ignore it, but one day it bothered me so much that I devoted a chunk of time to simply figuring it out. After some Googling, I realized I wasn’t the only person with this problem, it seemed to be persistent across multiple themes. The frustrating part was that the “solution” to the problem was different in every forum thread that I read. UGH! So, of course, I tried them all one-by-one until I found the winner. I can’t guarantee this will work for you on your theme, but you can try it.
From the WP dashboard, navigate to Appearance < Customize and go into the “Additional CSS” section. On a new line, add this code:
.wp-block-button.custom-button .wp-block-button__link:hover,
.wp-block-button.custom-button .wp-block-button__link:active,
.wp-block-button.custom-button .wp-block-button__link:focus {
background: #EE7575 !important;
color: #fff !important;
border-color: transparent !important;
}Change the “background” hex code to the color you desire for the button background on hover. But, before this will work, you’ll need to go back to your link-in-bio page. Click on the buttons, and in the Block settings, navigate down to the “Additional CSS class(es)” section, and add “custom-button” in those fields.
That’s it! You’re now the proud owner of your own link-in-bio page. Groovy. Go forth and share your links, drop yours in the comments too, I wanna see! Here’s how mine ended up.
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