In Part 1 of this step-by-step tutorial series, we explained how to use WordPress widgets and in Part Two, we explained how to configure a text widget.
In Part 3, we began configuring a number of widgets in WordPress.
In this final installment, we will complete the tutorial series by learning how to configure a few more useful sidebar 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:
Adding An RSS Widget To Your WordPress Sidebar
Let’s now add An RSS widget to the sidebar.
To add the widget, select an RSS widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your active area …
(WordPress RSS Widget)
Enter the following information into the widget settings:
- RSS feed URL: Enter the RSS feed URL into this section.
- Feed Title: If you would like to add a title to the feed, enter it into this field.
- Items to display: Choose the number of feed items you would like to display on the sidebar from the drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Check this box to show the RSS feed content.
- Display item author: Tick this box if you would like to show the item item author.
- Display item date: Check this box to display the feed item item date.
(RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different widget settings to find the combination that works best for you.
The example below shows the RSS Feed widget configured using the settings shown above …
(WordPress RSS Widget displayed on sidebar)
The screenshot below shows the RSS widget configured with some of the other options selected …
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
To learn more about using RSS feeds in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Adding A Tag Cloud To Your WordPress Sidebar Navigation Area
Let’s add a widget to display tags on the sidebar menu.
Tags appearing in your widget can be found in the Tags area …
(Tags screen)
To add 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 really not much to set up here. You can add a widget title, and choose whether to display items in the tag cloud using Tags or Categories. Click Save when finished …
(WordPress Tag Cloud Widget settings)
Your Tag cloud will now display on the sidebar …
(Tag Cloud widget set to display post tags)
The example below shows a published Tag Cloud widget configured to display Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag Cloud widget set to display WordPress post categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Configure The Archives Section In The Blog Sidebar
To complete this tutorial, we’ll configure the default Archives Widget, which is a common widget.
As you continue adding new content to WordPress, your older posts begin to get pushed further down the chronology ladder and become less visible to users. Your content is still there, it’s just not as visible.
The Archives Widget lets your visitors access previously published WordPress posts …
(WordPress Archives Widget)
There’s really not much to configure. You can add a title, and choose whether to display items in your Archives widget as a dropdown menu, and show the number of posts published each month . Click Save when done …
(WordPress Archives Widget settings)
The example below shows an Archives widget configured to display posts as a dropdown menu with number of posts enabled …
(WordPress Archives Widget displayed on sidebar)
Now that you know how to configure a number of widgets in WordPress, let’s explore some other useful ways to use WordPress widgets.
WordPress Widgets – Useful Tips
Here are some useful features worth knowing about 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 WordPress Sidebar Widgets
If you see widgets showing up on your blog sidebar that aren’t listed in your active sidebar inside your Appearance > Widgets section, it’s because some themes will display their own default set of widgets unless you add widgets to your sidebar area.
For example, this site displays some widgets in the sidebar …
If you look inside the Widgets area, however, you will see that no widgets have been added to the active widget areas …
This theme may be using default widgets.
Once you add one or more widgets to an available widget area, the placeholder widgets will disappear and be replaced with your newly-added widgets instead.
Note: If you want nothing to show up in the sidebar, either use a theme page template without a widgets section or just add a blank Text widget to the sidebar navigation area.
Add a blank text widget to a widget area …
And the default widgets will not appear in your sidebar/footer section …
Accessibility Mode
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. This is easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
You can rearrange your sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience.
If, however, you find that you are unable to drag & drop widgets around (e.g. using a mobile device that doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping), you can still use widgets if you enable Accessibility Mode.
Enabling Widget Accessibility Mode
Enabling Accessibility Mode, via the Screen Options, lets you use Add and Edit buttons instead of using drag-and-drop.
To enable Accessibility Mode, log into your WordPress administration area and navigate to the Widgets section …
(Widgets Menu)
Select Screen Options on the top right hand corner of the screen …
(Widgets – Screen Options)
Click on the Enable accessibility mode link …
(Turn on accessibility mode)
Once the feature has been enabled, the widgets in the Available Widgets and the Active Widgets sections, widgets will display an Add and Edit links respectively …
If you click on a Widget’s Add link in the Available Widgets section …
A screen opens up the selected widget with options for customizing the widget’s settings, selecting the widget location, plus drop-down menus for specifying the position of the widget in your widget area (e.g. position “1”, “3”, “6”, etc.) …
Click Save Widget to add the widget to your Active Widgets section, or click Cancel to go back to the previous screen …
Click on an active widget’s Edit link …
A screen displays the selected widget with options for editing the widget’s settings.
Click Save Widget to return to the Active Widgets screen, 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 go back to using drag and drop …
(Switch off accessibility mode)
Creating Your Own Custom Sidebar Widgets – A Simple Cheat
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 a new plugin on your website.
If you want to create your own sidebar widgets, then here is a simple and easy way:
First, create a new Post and type in the content that you would like to add to your sidebar area…
Make sure that any images you plan to use are resized to fit the maximum width of the sidebar navigation menu. Also, keep in mind that there’s no a lot of room to add content on your sidebar navigation menu, so try and keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about saving your Post – all we really need is the content HTML so we can paste it into the custom widget.
After creating your content, switch to the Text tab …
Select everything inside your text editor window and copy it to your clipboard…
Now, go into your Widgets Area.
Add a new Text widget to your sidebar, paste the content from your clipboard into the content field and click Save …
Your custom widget will be added to the sidebar…
(Create your own sidebar widgets)
Congratulations! Now you know how to use and configure sidebar widgets.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum