In Part One of this step-by-step tutorial, we explained how to use WordPress widgets and in Part 2, we explained how to configure a text widget.
In Part 3, we began configuring various sidebar widgets in WordPress.
In this final section, you are going to learn how to complete this step-by-step tutorial by configuring a few more commonly-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 A Newsfeed To The Blog Sidebar
Now, let’s add An RSS widget to display news items on your sidebar.
To add the widget, select an RSS widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your sidebar area …
(WordPress RSS Widget)
Enter the following information into the widget settings:
- RSS feed URL: Enter the URL of your RSS feed here.
- Feed Title: If you want to add a widget title, enter it here.
- Items to display: Choose how many feed items to show on your sidebar from this drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Tick this box if you would like to show the item content.
- Display item author: Tick this box if you want to show the feed item item author.
- Display item date: Tick this box to display the RSS feed item date.
(RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different settings to find the combination that best suits your needs.
The example below shows an RSS Feed widget configured using the above settings …
(RSS Widget displayed on sidebar)
The example below shows a published RSS widget configured with some of the other options selected …
(RSS Widget settings)
To learn more about using RSS feeds in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Add A Tag Cloud To Your WordPress Blog Sidebar
Now, let’s add a widget to the sidebar menu that will display clickable tags.
Tags displayed in your Tag Cloud widget are managed in the Tags screen …
(WordPress Tags area)
To add the widget, select a Tag Cloud widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your sidebar 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 …
(WordPress Tag Cloud Widget settings)
Your Tag cloud will now display on your sidebar navigation menu …
(Tag cloud set to display post tags)
The screenshot below shows a published Tag Cloud widget set up for displaying Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag Cloud widget displaying WordPress categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Configure The WordPress Archives Widget In Your Sidebar
To complete this tutorial, we’ll configure the Archives Widget, which is another commonly-used widget.
As you continue adding new content to WordPress, your older posts begin to get pushed further down the chronological ladder and become less visible to blog readers. Your posts are still there, it’s just not as visible.
The Archives Widget allows readers to access WordPress posts that you may have published some months ago …
(WordPress Archives Widget)
There is very little to set up in this widget. You can add a title if you want, and choose whether to display items in the sidebar as a dropdown menu, and display the number of posts . Click Save when done …
(Archives Widget settings)
The example below shows the Archives widget set for showing posts as a dropdown menu with post counts enabled …
(Archives Widget displayed on sidebar)
Now that you know how to configure various widgets in WordPress, let’s explore some other useful ways to use WordPress widgets.
WordPress Widgets – Useful Tips
Here are some useful features of 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 Sidebar Widgets
If you see widgets showing up on your blog sidebar that aren’t showing up in the active sidebar in your Appearance > Widgets section, it’s because with some themes, until you add widgets to your sidebar, the theme will display its own default set of widgets.
For example, this site displays widgets in the sidebar area …
If you look in the Widgets section, however, you may find that no widgets have actually been added to any of the active widget areas …
This theme is 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 your sidebar, either use a theme page template without a widgets layout or just add a blank Text widget to your sidebar area.
Just add a blank text widget to a widget area …
And default widgets won’t appear in your sidebar/footer section …
Widget Accessibility Mode
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily rearrange how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. This is easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
You can reorganize your sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience.
If, for some reason, you find that you cannot move widgets around using drag-and-drop (e.g. using a mobile device that doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping), then you can still work with widgets if you enable Accessibility Mode.
Enable Accessibility Mode For WordPress Widgets
Enabling Accessibility Mode, via the Screen Options, allows you to use Add and Edit buttons instead of using drag-and-drop.
To enable Accessibility Mode, log into your dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Widgets …
(WordPress Widgets Menu)
Select Screen Options on the top right hand corner of your screen …
(Widgets – Screen Options)
Click link to enable accessibility mode …
(Turn on accessibility mode)
Once accessibility mode has been enabled, the widgets in the Available Widgets and the Active Widgets sections, widgets will display an Add and Edit link 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 a location to add the widget, plus dropdown menus that let you specify the position of the widget in your widget location (e.g. position “1”, “3”, “6”, etc.) …
Click Save Widget to add the widget to the Active Widgets section, or 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 modifying the widget’s settings.
Click Save Widget to update your settings and go back 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 restore the drag & drop function to your Widgets …
(Disable accessibility mode)
Creating Your Own Custom 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 by plugins that you install on your website.
If you want to create your own sidebar widgets, then here is a really simple and easy way:
First, create a new Post and type in the content that you want to show on your sidebar navigation section…
Ensure that any images you plan to use fit the maximum width of your sidebar. Also, keep in mind that there’s no a lot of room to add content on your sidebar navigation section, so try and keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about publishing your Post – all we are after is the content to be pasted into a widget.
To get the content code, click on the Text tab …
Select everything inside the editor window and copy it to your clipboard…
Next, 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 widget will be added to your sidebar…
(Create your own sidebar widgets)
Congratulations! Now you know how to use and configure various sidebar widgets.
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