Widget Setup & Usage

On a WordPress site, the actual content of a post or page that you create doesn't take up the entire web page with most WordPress themes.

There is often other information or links above, below, and/or on the sides of the post/page content.

One of the most common examples of this is the sidebar, often found on the left or right hand side of a page. This sidebar will generally contain links to other pages on the site and other information that will show up on every page through the website.

WordPress Widgets allow you to control these sidebars and some other parts of the site that are not part of the post/page content.

To get to this page in WordPress, look for the Appearance menu on the left. Hover over it and click on Widgets.

On the right-hand side of the Widgets page, you should see a section at the top, called Primary Sidebar, filled with Widgets (as shown below). Each of the items listed here is a widget and can show up on the public website.

By default, these widgets are setup in this theme and get displayed in the right-hand sidebar of the public website. I've shown a picture below of what this is creating on the public site:

There are two ways you can remove a Widget that is already in place:

1. Just click on it and drag it to the Inactive Widgets bar in the bottom-left of the page. This keeps the settings for your widgets, in case you may want to restore them later. You can also just drag them off the sidebar to delete them entirely.
2. Click on the down arrow in the top-right of a Widget, then click the Delete link:

You can also see that when I clicked the down arrow in the top-right of the Widget, it offers me options. Not all Widgets will have options here but many do. If you make changes here, be sure to click the Save button when you are done.

For my Amazon affiliate site, I am actually going to remove all of the widgets except for the Search bar, as seen below.

I will be revisiting Widgets when I am actually building my site to add something useful here, but for now, I simply want to discuss how to go about adding Widgets.

On the left-hand side of the Widgets page, you have a large list of Available Widgets. Simply click one and drag it into a Widget position to add it to your site. You can then click the down arrow for the Widget to change settings for it.

Some widgets may be automated and work without any input from you, while others are simply designed to let you add your own custom content to the site as a widget. Be sure to read the description that comes along with each widget to see what it will do.

I've shown just a couple of the Available Widgets below:

Custom Menu is one that I actually use a lot, but it requires you to create your menu first. I'll be using this once I proceed with building the site, but I at least wanted to point it out for now. Recent Posts was the widget that I removed from this site. Text is a custom widget that allows you to set your own content, which can be plain text or even HTML code (something else I find myself using on many sites).

In addition to the Primary Sidebar, most WordPress themes will also offer other Widget areas on the site. This allows you to place your widgets where you want them to show up on the site (ie, you could place a widget in the Footer to get it to show up at the bottom of the site instead of in the sidebar).

Here are just some of the possible Widget areas available in the theme I use, Weaver II:

To get familiar with your WordPress theme and the available widget areas, try this exercise:

1. Add a Text widget to each of the available Widget areas.
2. Edit the settings for each of those Text widgets. Set the text to the name of the Widget area, and Save your changes.
3. Visit your live site to see the Widgets in action. This will give you a very clear idea of what is designed to show up where.

If you try this exercise, be sure to remove all of the Widgets you created once you are finished and have an understanding of your Widget areas.