In Part 1 of this tutorial series, we explained how to use WordPress widgets and in Part Two, you learned how to configure text widgets.
In Part Three, we began configuring a number of commonly-used WordPress widgets.
In this final section, we explain how to complete this step-by-step tutorial series by learning how to configure 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:
Adding A Newsfeed
Now, let’s add a widget to display news items on the sidebar navigation section.
To add the widget, find an RSS widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to your active area …
(RSS Widget)
Enter the following information into the widget settings:
- RSS feed URL: Paste the URL of your RSS feed here.
- Feed Title: If you would like to add a title to the widget, type it into this section.
- Items to display: Select how many feed items you want to show on your sidebar from the drop-down menu.
- Display item content: Check this box if you want to show the item content.
- Display item author: Tick this box if you would like to show the feed item item author.
- Display item date: Check this box if you would like to display the RSS feed item date.
(WordPress RSS Widget settings)
Experiment with different settings to find the ideal combination for you.
The example below shows the RSS widget configured using the above settings …
(RSS Widget displayed on sidebar)
The example below shows a published RSS Feed widget configured using 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 The WordPress Sidebar
Let’s now add a widget to the sidebar that displays a list of tags.
Tags displayed in the Tag Cloud widget can be found in the Tags area …
(WordPress Tags screen)
To insert the widget, select a Tag Cloud widget in the Available Widgets section and drag it to the sidebar area …
(Tag Cloud Widget)
There’s very little 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 done …
(Tag Cloud Widget settings)
Your Tag cloud will now display on the sidebar …
(Tag cloud displaying WordPress tags)
The screenshot below shows the Tag Cloud widget configured for displaying Categories instead of Tags …
(Tag cloud set to display WordPress post categories)
To learn more about using post tags in WordPress, see this tutorial:
Configuring The WordPress Archives Section
To complete this tutorial series, we’ll configure the default Archives Widget, which is a frequently-used WordPress widget.
As you publish new posts in WordPress, your older posts begin to get pushed further down the chronology list and become less visible to blog users. Your posts are still there, it’s just not as visible.
The Archives Widget lets blog readers access your previously published WordPress posts …
(Archives Widget)
There is really very little to configure. You can add a widget title, and choose whether to display items in the sidebar area in a dropdown menu, and display the number of posts . Click Save when finished …
(WordPress Archives Widget settings)
The screenshot below shows the Archives widget set up for showing posts as a dropdown menu with post counts enabled …
(Archives Widget displayed on sidebar)
Now that you know how to configure widgets on your WordPress site, let’s explore some other aspects of WordPress widgets.
WordPress Widgets – Useful Tips
Here are some useful ways to use 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 WordPress Sidebar Widgets
If you see widgets appearing on your blog sidebar navigation menu that aren’t listed in the active sidebar in your Appearance > Widgets section, it’s because with some themes, unless you add widgets to the sidebar area, the theme will display its own default set of widgets.
For example, this site displays widgets in the sidebar …
If you look inside the Widgets area, however, no widgets have actually been added to the active widget areas …
The above theme is using default widgets.
Once you add one or more widgets to an active widget area, the other widgets will disappear and be replaced with the selected widgets instead.
Note: If you don’t want anything to display in your sidebar navigation area, either use a theme page template without a widgets section or just add a blank Text widget to the sidebar.
Just add a blank text widget …
And default widgets won’t show in the sidebar/footer section …
Accessibility Mode
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily rearrange how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve user experience.
If, for some reason, you find that you are unable to drag-and-drop widgets around (e.g. using a mobile device that doesn’t support dragging-and-dropping), then you can still work with widgets by enabling Accessibility Mode.
How To Enable Widget Accessibility Mode
Enabling Accessibility Mode, via the Screen Options, lets you use Add and Edit buttons instead of dragging and dropping.
To enable Accessibility Mode, log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Widgets …
(Widgets Menu)
Click on Screen Options on the top right hand corner of the screen …
(Widgets – Screen Options)
Click on Enable accessibility mode …
(Enable 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 …
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, and dropdown menus that let you specify the position of the widget in the widget location (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 displays your selected widget with options for editing the widget’s 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 go back to using drag-and-drop …
(Turn off 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 when you install a new plugin on your website.
Here is a simple way to create your own custom sidebar widgets:
First, create a new Post and enter the content that you want to show on your sidebar…
Ensure that any images you use are resized to fit the maximum width of the sidebar. Also, keep in mind that there’s no a lot of room to put content on your blog sidebar, so try and keep your information concise.
Also, don’t worry about publishing your Post – all we really want is to copy the code of the content to be pasted into your sidebar widget.
After creating your content, click on the Text tab …
Select and copy everything 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 new custom widget will be added to your sidebar navigation area…
(Create your own custom sidebar widgets)
Congratulations! Now you know how to use and configure WordPress sidebar widgets.
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