In Part One of this tutorial, we explained how to use widgets in WordPress and in Part Two, you learned how to configure a text widget.
In Part 3, we began configuring a number of commonly-used widgets in WordPress.
In this final section, we show you how to complete the tutorial by configuring a few more frequently-used 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:
Add A Newsfeed Section To Your Blog Sidebar
Let’s now add An RSS widget to display news items on your sidebar.
To add the widget, find 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: Paste the RSS feed URL into this section.
- Feed Title: If you want to add an optional title to your feed, type it here.
- Items to display: Select how many RSS feed items you want to show in your sidebar menu from the drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Check this box to display the item content.
- Display item author: Check this box to display the item item author.
- Display item date: Tick this box to show the feed item item date.
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different settings to find the combination that best suits your needs.
The screenshot below shows an RSS widget configured using the above settings …
(RSS Widget displayed on sidebar navigation section)
The example below shows the RSS Feed widget configured with other options selected …
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
To learn more about using RSS feeds in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Adding A Tag Cloud
Now, let’s add A Tag Cloud widget to your sidebar section.
Tags appearing in your Tag Cloud widget can be found in the Tags area …
(Tags screen)
To use the widget, select a Tag Cloud widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your active area …
(WordPress Tag Cloud Widget)
There’s very little to configure. 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 …
(Tag Cloud widget set to display tags)
The example below shows an Tag Cloud widget set up for showing Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag cloud displaying WordPress post categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
How To Configure Your WordPress Archives Widget
To complete this tutorial, we’ll configure the Archives Widget, which is a frequently-used 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 site users. Your posts are still there, it’s just not as visible.
The Archives Widget allows your readers to view WordPress posts that you may have published a while back …
(WordPress Archives Widget)
There is very little to set up. You can add a title if you want, and choose whether to display items in your Archives widget in a dropdown menu, and show the number of posts . Click Save when finished …
(Archives Widget settings)
The example below shows the Archives widget configured for displaying posts as a dropdown menu with number of posts enabled …
(WordPress Archives Widget on blog sidebar)
Now that you know how to configure various widgets in WordPress, let’s explore some other aspects of using WordPress widgets.
Useful Widget Tips
Here are some additional features of 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 appearing on your blog sidebar that aren’t showing up in your active sidebar in 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, this site displays widgets in the sidebar …
If you look inside the Widgets area, however, you could find that no widgets have actually been added to the active widget areas …
This theme is using default widgets.
As soon as you add one or more widgets to an available widget area, the placeholder widgets will your selected widgets will be used instead.
Note: If you want no widgets 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 menu.
Just add a blank text widget …
And the default widgets will not display in the sidebar/footer section …
Accessibility Mode
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. This is easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can improve your site’s 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 use widgets if you enable Accessibility Mode.
Enabling Accessibility Mode For Widgets
Enabling Accessibility Mode, via Screen Options, allows you to use Add and Edit buttons instead of dragging and dropping.
To enable Accessibility Mode, log into your dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Widgets …
(WordPress Widgets Menu)
Click on Screen Options on the top right hand corner of the screen …
(WordPress Widgets – Screen Options)
Click on the Enable accessibility mode link …
(Enable 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 displays the selected widget with options for customizing its settings, selecting a widget location, plus dropdown menus that let you specify the position of the widget in your selected location (e.g. position “1”, “3”, “4”, etc.) …
Click Save Widget to add the widget to your Active Widgets section, or the Cancel button to go back to the previous screen …
Click on an active widget’s Edit link …
A screen will display your selected widget with options for modifying 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 area …
Click on Disable accessibility mode in the Screen Options section to restore the drag-and-drop functionality to your Widgets …
(Disable accessibility mode)
Creating Your Own Sidebar Widgets
Most of the widgets that you will use 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 custom sidebar widget, then here is a simple and easy way:
First, create a new Post and type in the content that you would like to show on the sidebar…
Make sure that any images you use fit the maximum width of your sidebar. Also, keep in mind that you don’t have a lot of room to add content on the sidebar navigation menu, so try and keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about saving your Post – all we need is the content HTML to paste into the custom sidebar widget.
To get the content code, click on the Text tab …
Select and copy everything 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 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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