How to Hide the LinkedIn Sidebar

You open LinkedIn to read your feed. LinkedIn has other plans: a news ticker on the right, ads below it, profile stats and shortcuts on the left, "add to your feed" suggestions everywhere. Your actual content — the posts — gets a narrow strip in the middle.

The sidebars exist to generate clicks, not to help you. Here's how to get rid of them.

Can you hide the sidebars in LinkedIn's settings?

No. There is no setting, toggle, or premium plan that removes the sidebars. You can't collapse the news module, you can't opt out of suggestions, and LinkedIn Premium doesn't change the layout at all. The sidebars are part of the engagement machine, and the engagement machine is not optional.

So the fix has to happen in your browser.

The DIY route — and why it doesn't last

If you're technically inclined, your first instinct is probably to hide the sidebar elements yourself with custom CSS rules in a user-style extension. It works on day one. The problem is day fifteen.

LinkedIn doesn't run one interface. It runs several front-end versions in parallel — a modern React stack and older legacy markup — and it A/B tests layouts continuously. Different accounts get different page structures; the same account can get a different structure after a deploy. Hand-written rules target the exact structure you saw when you wrote them. The moment LinkedIn serves you a different variant, your rules match nothing, and the news ticker is back like it never left.

That's not a one-time fix. That's a maintenance subscription you pay in evenings.

The one-click route

LinkFeed Pro handles the version problem for you. It detects which LinkedIn front-end your browser is actually rendering — React or legacy — and applies the matching patterns. LinkedIn changes; the extension adapts; your feed stays clean.

Hiding the sidebars is a free feature. No account, no trial, no card. Install, toggle, done:

1. Install LinkFeed Pro (Chrome, Edge or Firefox)
2. Open LinkedIn
3. Enable "Remove sidebars" in the extension popup

Both sidebars disappear — news, ads, suggestions, all of it. If you ever want them back, it's the same toggle.

What to do with the empty space

Once the sidebars are gone, you'll notice your feed is still a narrow column floating in whitespace. That's a separate LinkedIn quirk with a separate fix: see our guide to widening the LinkedIn feed. Combined with auto-expanding posts, it turns LinkedIn into something close to a reading app.

FAQ

Does hiding the sidebars break anything? No. Notifications, messaging, search and navigation all keep working. Only the visual modules are hidden.

Will LinkedIn know I'm hiding its sidebars? The extension changes how the page renders in your browser. It doesn't interact with your account, automate anything, or send data to LinkedIn.

Does this also remove ads in the feed itself? Hiding the sidebars removes the sidebar ads. Sponsored posts inside the feed are a different beast — no display tweak can reliably remove them without breaking the feed.

Is it really free? Yes. Sidebar removal, hiding the messaging popup and hiding the "Start a post" box are free forever. Pro features (auto-expand, wide feed, font size) have a 7-day free trial.