In Part 1 of this step-by-step tutorial, we explained how to use widgets in WordPress and in Part Two, we explained how to configure a text widget.
In Part Three, we began configuring various frequently-used WordPress widgets.
In this final installment, you are going to learn how to complete this step-by-step tutorial by configuring a few more frequently-used WordPress widgets.
In WordPress v. 4.8, WordPress introduced new media widgets covering images, audio, and video, and an updated text widget that supports visual editing …
(WordPress 4.8 introduced new widget updates)
These widgets let you add content from your media library and media stored in other servers or storage locations (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc.).
Let’s go through how to configure and use each of these widgets:
Rich Text Widget
From version 4.8 onward, WordPress has added native rich-text editing capabilities to text widgets …
(Rich Text Widget)
This lets you format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text quickly and easily …
(Format text easily with the new text widget)
To learn more about using text widgets in WordPress, see the tutorial below:
WordPress Image Widget
The WordPress Image Widget lets you add an image to your sidebar from your Media Library or an external storage location.
To add an image, drag an image widget to your active widgets area …
(Image Widget)
Click on ‘Add Image’ …
(Let’s add an image!)
Select an image from the Image Library, check or add image details (e.g. Caption, Alt text, Description, etc.) if desired and click the ‘Add to Widget’ button …
(Select an image)
The image will automatically load into the widget area …
(Image added to widget)
Add a Title to your image if you want, or leave the ‘Title:’ field blank and click ‘Save’ …
(Save your image)
Preview your website and you should see the image displayed where you have placed your image widget …
(Image added to website using WordPress image widget)
If you want to link your image to an URL, go back to your image widget and click on ‘Edit Image’ …
(Image Widget – Edit Image)
Add a URL in the ‘Image Details’ > ‘Display Settings’ > ‘Link To’ screen and click the ‘Update’ button …
(Link your image to an URL)
To add an image stored in an external server or remote location, locate and copy the URL of the image to your clipboard …
(Copy image URL to your clipboard)
Go back to your image widget and click on ‘Replace Image’ …
(Image Widget – Replace image)
The Media Library browser opens. Click on ‘Insert from URL’ and paste in the image URL copied to your clipboard, then click on ‘Add to Widget’ …
(Add image URL)
If you have previously added an image title in your widget, remember to replace it if required, then click ‘Save’ …
(Save your new image)
The new image will now display on your sidebar …
(New image added using WordPress image widget)
To learn more about adding images to WordPress, see this tutorial:
WordPress Video Widget
The WordPress Video Widget lets you add audio files to your sidebar from your Media Library, YouTube, Vimeo, or an external storage location.
To add a video to the sidebar, drag a Video widget to your active widgets area …
(Drag a Video widget to your sidebar)
Click the ‘Add Video’ button …
(Video widget – Add Video)
Select a video from your media library or add a video URL and click the ‘Add to Widget’ button …
(Add a video URL)
Add a title to the widget if desired and click ‘Save’ …
(WordPress Video Widget – Save Button)
Your video will display on your site where the video widget has been added …
(Video added using WordPress video widget)
To learn more about adding video to WordPress, see this tutorial:
WordPress Audio Widget
The WordPress Audio Widget lets you add audio files like podcasts, music or a personal greeting to your sidebar from your media library or an external storage location.
To add an audio file to your sidebar, drag an audio widget to your active widgets area …
(Add an audio widget to your sidebar)
Click the ‘Add Audio’ button…
(WordPress Audio Widget – Add Audio button)
Select an audio file from your media library or insert the URL of an audio file stored in an external location …
(Select your audio file)
Add a title to your widget if desired and click the ‘Save’ button …
(Save the audio file on your audio widget)
Your site will now display an audio file to visitors where you have placed the audio widget …
(Audio file added to your site using the WordPress Audio Widget)
To learn more about adding audios to WordPress, see this tutorial:
Add An RSS Widget
Let’s now add An RSS widget to your sidebar navigation menu.
To add the widget, find an RSS widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your active area …
(RSS Widget)
Enter the following information into the widget settings:
- RSS feed URL: Paste the URL of your RSS feed into this field.
- Feed Title: If you want to add an optional title to the widget, enter it into this field.
- Items to display: Select the number of items you want to show in your sidebar from the drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Check this box if you would like to display the feed item content.
- Display item author: Tick this box if you want to show the RSS feed item author.
- Display item date: Tick this box if you want to show the RSS feed item date.
(RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different widget settings to find the ideal combination for your site.
The example below shows a published RSS Feed widget configured using the above settings …
(RSS Widget added to sidebar)
The screenshot below shows the RSS widget configured with additional options selected …
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
To learn more about using RSS feeds in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Add A Tag Cloud To The Blog Sidebar
Now, let’s add a widget to your sidebar menu that will display a list of tags.
Tags displayed in your widget are listed in the Tags section …
(WordPress Tags screen)
To insert the widget, find a Tag Cloud widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your active area …
(WordPress Tag Cloud Widget)
There is not much to set up here. You can add a title, and choose whether to display items in the tag cloud using Tags or Categories. Click Save when finished …
(Tag Cloud Widget settings)
Your Tag cloud will now display on the sidebar …
(Tag Cloud widget displaying tags)
The screenshot below shows a published Tag Cloud widget configured for showing Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag Cloud widget displaying categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Configuring Your WordPress Archives Section
To complete this tutorial, we’ll configure the default Archives Widget, which is another frequently-used WordPress widget.
As you continue publishing new posts in WordPress, your older posts begin to move further away from public view. Your content is still there, it’s just not as visible.
The Archives Widget lets your visitors view less visible posts …
(WordPress Archives Widget)
There is really not much to set up here. You can add a widget title, and choose whether to display items in the sidebar as a dropdown menu, and show post counts . Click Save when done …
(Archives Widget settings)
The example below shows an Archives widget set for showing posts as a dropdown menu with number of posts checkbox enabled …
(Archives Widget displayed on blog sidebar)
Now that you know how to configure a number of widgets on your WordPress site, let’s explore some other useful things about using WordPress widgets.
WordPress Widgets – Useful Tips
Here are some useful ways to use WordPress widgets:
Add ‘Visibility’ Function To Widgets
Installing the Jetpack plugin not only adds many new widgets to your widgets area …
(Jetpack Widgets)
It also adds a useful ‘Visibility’ function to all WordPress widgets …
(Jetpack adds ‘Visibility’ to all widgets)
This function lets you specify whether to display or hide widgets from your sidebar based on conditions you set for a particular category, author, user. role, tag, date, or page …
(Set conditions to show or hide widgets)
This is a really useful function to have.
For example, you can:
- Display a widget only on your home page or only on posts published under certain categories, tags, authors, dates, etc.
- Configure widgets to display specific or time-sensitive announcements based on a post’s category, date, etc.
- Configure widgets to display targeted ad banners based on a post’s category or tag.
- Hide widgets from appearing on certain posts or pages to prevent users from being distracted (e.g. remove widgets with ads from your sales pages).
- And more!
To learn more about using the Jetpack plugin, go here:
Overriding Default Widgets
If you see widgets displaying on your site’s sidebar that aren’t showing up in the active sidebar inside your Appearance > Widgets section, it’s because some themes will display their own default set of widgets until you add widgets to your sidebar.
For example, the site below shows some widgets in the sidebar section …
If you look inside the Widgets section, however, no widgets have actually been added to any of the available widget areas …
This is because the theme above may be using default widgets.
As soon as you add one or more widgets to an active widget area, the placeholder widgets will disappear and be replaced with your newly-added widgets instead.
Note: If you don’t want anything to appear in the sidebar, either use a theme page template without a widgets section or just add a blank Text widget to your sidebar section.
Add a blank text widget to a widget area …
And default widgets won’t appear in the sidebar/footer section …
Widget Accessibility Mode
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. This is easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
You can reorganize your sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience.
If, however, you find that you are unable to drag and drop widgets around (e.g. using a mobile device that doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping), you can still use widgets by enabling Accessibility Mode.
Enabling Accessibility Mode For WordPress Widgets
Enabling Accessibility Mode, via the Screen Options, allows you to use Add and Edit buttons instead of using drag & drop.
To enable Accessibility Mode, log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Widgets …
(WordPress Widgets Menu)
Click on Screen Options on the top right hand corner of the screen …
(Widgets – Screen Options)
Click on the Enable accessibility mode link …
(Enable accessibility mode)
Once accessibility mode has been enabled, the widgets in the Available Widgets section will display an Add link, and the widgets in the Active Widgets section will display an Edit link …
Click on a Widget’s Add link in the Available Widgets section …
A screen displays the selected widget with options for customizing its settings, selecting the location to add the widget, and drop-down menus for specifying the position of the widget in your widget location (e.g. position “1”, “3”, “4”, etc.) …
Click Save Widget to add the widget to your Active Widgets section, or Cancel to return to the previous screen …
Click on an active widget’s Edit link …
A screen will display your selected widget with options for editing its settings.
Click Save Widget to return to the Active Widgets section, or click the Delete button to remove the widget from the Active Widgets section …
Click on Disable accessibility mode in the Screen Options section to restore the drag-and-drop functionality to your Widgets …
(Switch off accessibility mode)
Create Your Own Sidebar Widgets
Most widgets will either be installed by default when you create a new WordPress site, or be automatically added to your Available Widgets section when you install new plugins on your site.
Here is an easy way to create your own sidebar widgets:
First, create a new Post and type in the content that you would like to display on the sidebar section…
Make sure that any images you plan to use are resized to fit the maximum width of the sidebar. Also, keep in mind that you don’t have a lot of room to put content on the sidebar, so keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about publishing your Post – all we are really looking for is to copy the content so we can paste it into a sidebar widget.
To get the content code, click on the Text tab …
Select everything inside the editor window and copy it to your clipboard…
Now, go into your Widgets Area.
Insert a new Text widget into your sidebar, paste the content from your clipboard into the content field and click Save …
Your new custom widget is now added to the sidebar section…
(Create your own custom sidebar widgets)
Congratulations! Now you know how to use and configure a number of WordPress sidebar widgets.
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