In Part 1 of this step-by-step tutorial series, we explained how to use widgets in WordPress and in Part 2, you learned how to configure text widgets.
In Part 3, we began configuring various commonly-used widgets in WordPress.
In this final section, we will conclude this step-by-step tutorial series by configuring a few more commonly-used WordPress 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 A Newsfeed
Let’s add An RSS 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 …
(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 a widget title, type it here.
- Items to display: Select the number of items you would like to show on your sidebar from this drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Check this box to display the RSS feed content.
- Display item author: Tick this box if you want to show the RSS feed item author.
- Display item date: Tick this box to show the item item date.
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different options to find the combination that best suits your needs.
The example below shows a published RSS Feed widget configured using the settings shown above …
(RSS Widget added to sidebar)
The screenshot below shows a published RSS Feed widget configured using additional options selected …
(RSS Widget settings)
To learn more about using RSS feeds in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Add A Tag Cloud
Now, let’s add a widget to the sidebar that will display tags.
Tags appearing in your widget can be found in the Tags area …
(Tags area)
To add the widget, find a Tag Cloud widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your sidebar …
(Tag Cloud Widget)
There’s really not much to set up here. You can add a title if you want, 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 your sidebar …
(Tag cloud displaying tags)
The screenshot below shows a published Tag Cloud widget configured to show Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag cloud set to display categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Configuring Your WordPress Archives Section
To complete this tutorial, we’ll configure the default Archives Widget, which is a frequently-used 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 allows readers to view older published WordPress posts …
(WordPress Archives Widget)
There’s not much to set up. You can add a title, and choose whether to display items in the sidebar in a dropdown menu, and show the number of posts . Click Save when done …
(WordPress Archives Widget settings)
The example below shows an Archives widget configured for showing posts as a dropdown menu with post counts enabled …
(WordPress Archives Widget on sidebar area)
Now that you know how to configure various widgets, let’s explore some other useful aspects of using WordPress widgets.
Useful Widget Tips
Here are some useful things to know about 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:
How To Override Default Widgets
If you see widgets appearing on your site’s sidebar navigation area that aren’t showing up under the 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 navigation area.
For example, this site displays a couple of widgets in the sidebar area …
If you look inside the Widgets section, however, no widgets have been added to any of the active widget areas …
The theme above is 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 selected widgets instead.
Note: If you want no widgets to appear in your sidebar area, either use a theme page template without a widgets section or just add a blank Text widget to the sidebar area.
Add a blank text widget …
And the default widgets won’t appear in your sidebar/footer section …
Accessibility Mode
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar menu by switching around the search and testimonial sections. This is easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
You can rearrange your sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience.
If, however, you find that you are unable to use the drag-and-drop function to move widgets around (e.g. using a mobile device that doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping), you can still work with widgets by enabling Accessibility Mode.
How To Enable Accessibility Mode For Widgets
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 Enable accessibility mode …
(Switch 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 links respectively …
If you 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 widget location, with dropdown menus for specifying the position of the widget in your widget area (e.g. position “1”, “2”, “6”, etc.) …
Click Save Widget to add the widget to the Active Widgets section, or click the Cancel button to go back to your previous screen …
Click on the Edit link of an active widget …
A screen will display the selected widget with options for modifying its settings.
Click Save Widget to update your settings and return 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 …
(Switch off accessibility mode)
How To Create Your Own Custom 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 area by plugins that you install on your website.
Here is an easy way to create your own custom sidebar widgets:
First, create a new Post and enter the content that you want to display in the sidebar…
Ensure that any images you plan to use are resized to fit the maximum width of the sidebar navigation section. Also, keep in mind that there’s no a lot of room to add content on the sidebar, so try and keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about saving your Post – all we need is to copy the content HTML to be pasted into the custom sidebar widget.
After creating your content, switch to the Text tab …
Select and copy everything to your clipboard…
Now, go into your Widgets Screen.
Insert a new Text widget into your sidebar, paste the content from your clipboard into the content field and click Save …
Your new widget is now added to your sidebar…
(Create your own sidebar widgets)
Congratulations! Now you know how to use and configure various WordPress sidebar widgets.
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