If you’re using your blog for business, you should be aware that Blogger has a feature that can undermine your blog’s professionalism.

By default, Blogger blogs will all feature a Navigation bar at the top of the blog like this:

When someone clicks on the “Next Blog” link, they are sent off to some random other blog that you have no control over. If you do send your readers off your page, it should be to something that you know is worthwhile and of value to them - you can guarantee this with the “Next Blog” button feature. At this stage, there it doesn’t even seem to send readers to a blog with similar keywords. You could have a blog on your legal practice and the button could send someone to a blog on collecting string - not the best look.

It’s often listed as one of the biggest downsides to having a Blogger blog. Fortunately, there is a way to remove the “Next Blog” button…

1. Go to your Layout tab and select “Edit HTML”

2. Make sure before you do anything, you back up your template by clicking on “Download Full Template” - save this somewhere memorable on your hard drive. If something goes wrong then you can always come back here, use the “Choose File” button to find the downloaded backup on your hard drive and click “Upload” to restore your old working template.

3. The next step involves going into the blog’s template’s code but you just need to copy and paste. If code makes you panicky, relax and think of only following these instructions - if you do make a mistake or it just doesn’t work with your template, you just restore your old template using Step 2.

Still in “Edit HTML” scroll through the template to find the body tag - the start will look like ”body {” (1 in the picture below) and the end will be “}” (2 in the picture below).

Now you want to copy and paste the following code after the end of the body tag so after the “}” marked by the number 2 above:

#navbar-iframe {
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}

So it should look like this:

4. Hit “Save Template” and view your blog, it should have removed the Blogger navigation bar along with the “Next Blog” button like so:

This step should be quite safe but if for some reason it does play havoc with your design, go back to Step 2 to upload and restore your old template.

5. Remember if you change your blog design in the future to make sure this step is done if you don’t want the “Next Blog” button on your blog.

6. If you want the navigation bar back, just remove the code you copied and pasted into your template.

You’ll note that the search bar that lets readers search your blog has gone - tomorrow we’ll show you how to get a new search bar.

This is part of our super series on How to Blog. Subscribe to our Newsletter for some special surprise How to Blog stuff over the course of the lessons.