In Part 1 of this tutorial series, we explained the basics of how to use WordPress widgets.
In this section you will learn how to configure a number of WordPress widgets.
Sidebar Widget Configuration
In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of pre-installed active widgets, such as widgets for displaying links to your site’s pages, filter posts by categories, RSS feed content, add tag clouds, etc.
(In a default WordPress installation, your site comes with a number of built-in widgets)
How To Configure Commonly-Used WordPress Sidebar Widgets: Tutorial
In this step-by-step tutorial, you will add, configure and reorder a number of frequently-used WordPress widgets, including:
- Adding a clickable Support Contact image linking visitors to your help page.
- Add a Categories section with a drop down menu.
- Add a Recent Posts section to display the latest posts.
- Adding a list of your site’s Pages.
- Display important Links on your sidebar section.
- Displaying news items with an RSS Feed section.
- Adding a Tag Cloud.
- Configure how Archived Posts display on your sidebar menu.
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
(Widgets Menu)
This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
Let’s get started …
Adding Text Widgets To The Sidebar Section
Text widgets are incredibly versatile …
(WordPress Text widget)
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 quickly and easily format text, create lists, add emphasis, and insert links into your sidebar text …
(Format text easily with the new text widget)
Text widgets let you insert just about anything you want into your sidebar navigation menu or other widget sections, such as lists of favorite items, image links, tips and more to your site … just type in text or paste HTML into the content area. You can also give the widget a title. Remember to save your settings when done …
(A text widget is really useful!)
Example: Add A Help Button To The Sidebar Menu Using A Text Widget
For this example, let’s set up a clickable support button on your sidebar navigation area that takes your visitors to a page on your site (or an external site, e.g. a helpdesk) where they can contact you for help and support.
First, you will need to create or source a “help button” graphic image that you will use on your own site …
We’ll set up the clickable Help button to display at the top of the sidebar navigation menu like in the example shown below …
Step 1 – Upload your image.
Upload the graphic image to the images folder in your server and write down the URL pointing to your server’s image location.
For example …
http://www.yourdomain.com/images/supportbutton.jpg
This information will be used in Step 3.
In order for someone to go to the contact page when they click on the help button, you will need to either create a contact page, or have an existing destination page already set up (e.g. a helpdesk). We will link your button image to this URL in Step 3 …
Step 2 – Create the contact page.
Create a contact page and note the page URL …
Step 3 – Create the code for your text widget.
Don’t worry … this sounds a lot more technical than it is. Basically, we just need to create the instructions linking your graphic image to your destination URL.
Your instructions can be composed in a plain text file and should look something like this …
- Replace “http://www.yourdomain.com/contact-us” in the code above with the URL of your contact page location.
- Replace “http://yourimagelocation.com/img/supportbutton.jpg” in the code with the URL of your image location.
The screenshot below shows the sections of the above code that you will need to replace with the actual web addresses …
Replace the above URLs and then copy all of your text file content to your clipboard when finished.
If you need help figuring out basic HTML code, refer to this tutorial:
Next, go back into your Widgets section …
(Widgets Screen)
Step 4 – Add a Text widget.
Add a Text widget to your sidebar in the location where your clickable button should display.
In the Available Widgets area, select the Text widget …
(Text widget)
Drag your Text widget to your Active Widgets section and release it at the top of the Widget Area …
(Drag-and-drop your WordPress text widget)
Step 5 – Configure the widget.
Click on the widget title bar to configure the widget options. Paste the code with the links to your contact page and graphic button into your text widget content area and click save …
Add a heading to the widget if you want (e.g. “Need Help?”, “Get Help”, etc.) and paste the code with the correct destination URLs into the Content box, then click Save when done …
Note: Make sure to check your contact page and image links before pasting scripts into the Text Widget, or the button will not work.
*** If using WordPress version pre-4.8 ***
If you’re adding text without formatting tags like paragraph breaks, you may want to tick the Automatically add paragraphs box to wrap each block of text in paragraphs (note: this is not necessary if you type in formatted HTML content like we’re doing in this tutorial).
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs box not ticked …
(Automatically add paragraphs option not checked)
Here is some text with Automatically add paragraphs option ticked …
(Automatically add paragraphs box ticked)
***
Step 6 – Refresh your browser.
Once you have added the text widget and HTML code, visit the front end of your site and refresh your browser. If all links have been entered correctly, then your clickable support button will display in your site’s sidebar menu …
(Clickable button widget on blog sidebar)
The screenshot above shows the button in the sidebar of a newly-installed WordPress site.
Step 7 – Test your widget.
The last step is to make sure that your destination link works. Test this by clicking on the support button. You should be taken to your contact page …
(Test your clickable button)
Useful Tips:
If you would like the contact page to open in a new browser window when visitors click on the support (so they don’t leave the page they’re on), then change the code from this:
To this (i.e. include the part containing target=”_blank” in the code):
When inserting images into your sidebar menu, make sure that the width of your image does not exceed the width of your sidebar column, especially if you are using a non-responsive WordPress theme. As mentioned earlier, some themes may display elements differently depending on their templates and their layout. Some sidebars may be too wide or too narrow. If your theme’s sidebar width is narrower than the width of the graphic images, then you may have to either adjust the size of your images, or the column width to make the images display correctly on your theme.
(Make sure the width of the image does not exceed the sidebar column width)
Additional Tips:
- If you don’t want your button to be centered inside your sidebar, delete the <center> and </center> tags from the beginning and end of the line of code. The image will then be aligned to its default settings (normally left-aligned).
- Link the help button to any destination you want (e.g. to an external site, helpdesk, FAQ page, etc.) and change this anytime by editing the links inside the widget.
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This is the end of section two of this tutorial series.
Click here to keep reading:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now