In Part 1 of this step-by-step tutorial, we explained how to use widgets in WordPress and in Part Two, you learned how to configure a text widget.
In Part Three, we began configuring various WordPress widgets.
In this final installment, you are going 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
Let’s add a widget to display news items on the sidebar.
To add the widget, find an RSS widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your sidebar …
(WordPress RSS Widget)
Enter the following information into the widget settings:
- RSS feed URL: Paste the RSS feed URL here.
- Feed Title: If you would like to add an optional title to the widget, enter it into this field.
- Items to display: Choose how many feed items to show in the sidebar area from the drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Tick this box if you would like to display the RSS feed content.
- Display item author: Tick this box to show the item item author.
- Display item date: Tick this box to display the RSS feed item date.
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different settings to find the combination that suits your needs best.
The example below shows an RSS Feed widget configured using the settings shown above …
(RSS Widget added to sidebar navigation menu)
The screenshot below shows a published RSS Feed 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 Your WordPress Blog Sidebar
Now, let’s add A Tag Cloud widget to the sidebar.
Tags displayed in the widget can be found 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 the active area …
(WordPress Tag Cloud Widget)
There’s not much to set up. You can add a widget title, and choose whether to display items in the tag cloud using Tags or Categories. Click Save when done …
(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 an Tag Cloud widget set up to display Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag cloud displaying WordPress post categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Configure The Archives Section In Your Sidebar Area
To complete this tutorial, we’ll configure the Archives Widget, which is another common WordPress widget.
As you keep publishing new posts in WordPress, your older posts begin to get pushed further down the chronology list and become less visible to users. Your content is still there, it’s just not as visible.
The Archives Widget lets readers access earlier WordPress posts …
(Archives Widget)
There’s not much to set up here. You can add a title if you want, and choose whether to display items in the sidebar area as a dropdown menu, and display the number of posts . Click Save when finished …
(Archives Widget settings)
The screenshot below shows a published Archives widget set to display posts as a dropdown menu with post counts checkbox enabled …
(Archives Widget on sidebar section)
Now that you know how to configure WordPress widgets, let’s explore some other areas of WordPress widgets.
Useful Widget Tips
Here are some useful 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 showing up on your site’s sidebar that aren’t listed in your active sidebar in the Appearance > Widgets section, it’s because some themes will display their own default set of widgets until you add widgets to the sidebar navigation section.
For example, the site below shows widgets in the sidebar section …
If you look inside the Widgets area, however, you will see that no widgets have actually been added to any of the available widget areas …
This is because the above 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 don’t want anything 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.
Add a blank text widget …
And the default widgets won’t display in your sidebar/footer section …
Widget Accessibility Mode
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the site’s sidebar menu 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 layout with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience.
If, however, you find that you cannot move widgets using drag and drop (e.g. using a mobile device that doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping), you can still work with widgets if you enable Accessibility Mode.
Enable Widget Accessibility Mode
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 admin area and navigate to Appearance > Widgets …
(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 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 will display the selected widget with options for customizing the widget’s settings, selecting a location to add the widget, and dropdown menus for specifying the position of the widget in the widget location (e.g. position “1”, “3”, “6”, etc.) …
Click Save Widget to add the widget to your Active Widgets section, or click the Cancel button to go back to the previous screen …
Click on the Edit link of an active widget …
A screen displays your selected widget with options for editing the widget’s settings.
Click Save Widget to update your settings and go back to the Active Widgets section, or click the Delete button to delete the widget from the Active Widgets area …
Click on Disable accessibility mode in the Screen Options section to go back to using drag-and-drop …
(Turn off accessibility mode)
How To Create 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 when you install a new plugin on your site.
Here is a simple way to create your own custom sidebar widget:
First, create a new Post and enter the content that you want to display in the sidebar section…
Ensure 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 menu, so keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about publishing your Post – all we really need is to copy the content so we can paste it into a widget.
To get the content code, switch to the Text tab …
Select everything in the editor window and copy it to your clipboard…
Next, go into your Widgets Screen.
Add a new Text widget to your sidebar, paste the content from your clipboard into the content field and click Save …
Your custom widget is now added to the sidebar menu…
(Create your own custom sidebar widgets)
Congratulations! Now you know how to use and configure a number of commonly-used WordPress sidebar widgets.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)