Sidebar
The Sidebar is the narrow column that runs down the left side of Salesforce Classic pages.
Definition
The Sidebar is the narrow column that runs down the left side of Salesforce Classic pages. It holds Recent Items, the Create New quick-create menu, Messages and Alerts, Custom Links, Items to Approve, and whatever custom components an admin adds.
It is the older option. The Sidebar exists only in Salesforce Classic, and Lightning Experience has no counterpart to it. Salesforce still ships it and still supports it, and has added nothing to it in years.
What lands there comes from a Salesforce Classic Home Page Layout, which splits its components between a narrow column and a wide one. Admins assign those layouts by profile, so two users in the same org can open different strips.
In plain English
“Think of the left edge of an older Salesforce screen as a small shelf. The shelf holds what you reach for all day. The last few records you opened, a button to start a new one, and any links your admin pinned there. Newer Salesforce screens took the shelf apart and moved each item somewhere else. Nothing was lost, it just stopped living in one strip.”
Worked example
A regional insurance brokerage still runs its service team in Classic. The admin opens Setup, finds Home Page Layouts, and edits a layout called Service Rep Home. Under Narrow Components she checks Recent Items, Create New, and Custom Links. She adds an HTML Area component called Renewals Hotline carrying a phone number and two static links. She saves and assigns the layout to the Service Rep profile. Then she sets enableCustomSidebarOnAllPages to true, so the hotline block follows reps onto Case and Account pages. She switches on the collapsible sidebar too. A rep opening Case 00041237 now sees the last ten records she touched in the left strip. She can hide it when a long description field needs the full width.
What sits in the Classic Sidebar, and where each piece went
The narrow column of a Home Page Layout
Everything in the strip comes from one place. In Setup, the area is filed under Salesforce Classic Home Tab Page Layouts, and each layout sorts its components into Narrow Components and Wide Components. Narrow is the Sidebar. Wide is the large right-hand area that carries a dashboard snapshot or a feed. The Metadata API describes the same split. A HomePageComponent record carries a width of narrowComponents or wideComponents. The reference is explicit that the type customizes the Home tab in Salesforce Classic. Four component types are available to build: links, htmlArea, imageOrNote, and visualforcePage. That short list is the entire custom surface. Anything richer has to be a Visualforce page hosted inside a visualforcePage component.
Recent Items, Create New, and the standard strip
Recent Items is the component most Classic users actually notice. It lists up to ten records, documents, and custom object rows you most recently added, edited, or viewed. Each entry links straight to the detail or edit page. Whether hovering an entry opens a detail overlay depends on a separate switch. That switch is Enable Hover Details, under User Interface in Setup, and the Metadata API calls it enableHoverDetails. Salesforce ties the fields in that overlay to the object's mini page layout. Leave it off and hovering does nothing. Create New is a dropdown that starts a blank record without opening the object's tab first. Messages and Alerts pushes an admin-written notice to everyone or to specific profiles. Custom Links holds admin-defined shortcuts, and Items to Approve surfaces records waiting on the logged-in user. There is also a Calendar shortcut, switched on under Activity Settings with Enable Sidebar Calendar Shortcut, which renders above Recent Items. That setting is visible from Lightning Setup and does nothing whatsoever for Lightning users.
HTML Area limits and the Visualforce Area escape hatch
The HTML Area component is where admins put a banner, a short notice, or a small block of links. It accepts self-contained, well-formed markup and very little else. Salesforce Help is blunt about the ceiling: home page components do not support JavaScript, CSS, iframes, or a range of other advanced markup. Teams usually discover this when a banner that worked years ago has quietly stopped rendering and nobody can say when. The supported alternative is the Visualforce Area component, which hosts a Visualforce page in the strip and can carry custom markup and script. There is a catch worth planning around. The page renders inside an iframe, so it cannot script the Classic page around it. Salesforce does pass the component the record ID and top-level URL of the page it sits on. If you need more reach than those two values, this is the wrong host.
Two settings decide how far it reaches
By default a custom component shows on the Home tab only, and the strip is always expanded. Two org-level settings change that, and the Metadata API marks both as Salesforce Classic only. enableCollapsibleSidebar lets users show or hide the Sidebar on every page that normally includes it. enableCustomSidebarOnAllPages makes custom components available on all pages for every user in the org. Both default to false, which is why a freshly built HTML Area banner turns up on Home and nowhere else. Switch on the all-pages setting rather than duplicating the same content across layouts. Switch on the collapsible option if your reps work record pages with long text fields. On a cramped laptop screen, that column width is worth more than a shortcut list.
Why Lightning has none, and what to map to
Lightning Experience was redesigned from the tab strip outward, and the Sidebar did not come along. Its jobs were split up. The navigation bar took the tab and app-switching role. The App Launcher took the find-anything-in-the-org role. Global search and the per-item dropdowns in the navigation bar cover recently viewed records. The utility bar, docked along the bottom, holds the always-on tools that used to justify keeping the left strip open all day. Custom content moved to Lightning App Builder, where you place components on a Home page or a record page instead of a narrow column. If you are planning a move off Classic, inventory the strip component by component and pick a destination for each one. Recreating the strip itself is the wrong goal, and admins who try it tend to ship a Lightning Home page nobody opens.
How organizations use Sidebar
Runs a Visualforce Area component in the narrow column so dispatchers see live carrier status from an Apex controller instead of a static link list.
Uses Messages and Alerts to push a fiscal-year-end reminder to the Development profile, then pulls it once the deadline passes.
Audits every component in its Home Page Layouts first, so each Custom Link and HTML Area block gets a named destination.
Trust & references
Cross-checked against the following references.
- Home Page Components Tips and Considerations (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Design Home Page Layouts in Salesforce Classic (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Visualforce Area Home Page Components (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Open Items You've Recently Viewed (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Create Records from the Sidebar (opens in new tab)Salesforce
- Add a 'Calendar' shortcut to the sidebar (opens in new tab)Salesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Sidebar.
Hands-on resources to go deeper on Sidebar.
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He writes and edits salesforcedictionary.com, published by KineticBit Inc., to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
Test your knowledge
+5 pts / dayQ1. Where do the components that appear in the Salesforce Classic Sidebar come from?
Q2. An admin builds an HTML Area Sidebar component containing a small JavaScript countdown. What happens?
Q3. A custom Sidebar component shows on the Home tab but nowhere else. Which org setting changes that?
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