How to add Widgets in WordPress Website?

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Widgets are a block of content that you can add to specific areas on your website like footers, sidebars, etc. The widgets help your website, visitors, with quick and easy navigation and access to various important features, functions, links, etc on your site.

This post will cover how to add widgets to a WordPress website.

Step 1) Go to Widgets from Dashboard

First, go to Appearance > Widgets from the website dashboard.

go to widgets wordpress widget settings
Go to Widgets

Then, you will reach the interface to edit and add widgets.

wordpress widgets dashboard wordpress widget settings
WordPress widgets dashboard

As you can see, there are 8 widget areas here – 1 for the sidebar, 6 for footers, and 1 as inactive widgets. Depending on the theme you use, you get different widget areas.

Step 2) Select a Widget Area

Now, let’s select a widget area and edit it depending on how you want it to look.

For now, we are going to edit the widget area ‘Main Sidebar’. For that, click on the dropdown arrow next to it open the widget area.

select the widget area to edit wordpress widget settings
select the widget area to edit

It already has some widgets added to it. You can edit the existing widgets or add some other widgets and edit them.

For now, we are quickly going to remove all the widgets there so that we can add new ones from scratch.

Step 3) Add Widgets

Adding widgets is similar to adding blocks on the Gutenberg post and page editor.

At first, click on the plus (+) button to see the available blocks to add. You can either search for the blocks or browse. You can see the full list of blocks to add if you click on the blue plus (+) button at the top-left side of the interface.

see available widgets with the plus button wordpress widget settings
see available widgets

Now, select from the available blocks to go on the sidebar widget area.

adding block as widget wordpress widget settings
adding block as widget

You can add different content like heading, paragraphs, pictures, quotes, tables, buttons, shortcodes, social icons, search boxes, etc.

Step 4) Edit the Added Widget

After you have added widgets to the widget area, edit them accordingly.

For demonstration, here we selected the heading block, typed in a heading title, and performed some edits like H2 heading level, bold, italic, etc.

editing block inside widget wordpress widget settings
editing block inside widget

Similarly, we added some more blocks, edited them accordingly.

Step 5) Click on ‘Update’

After you have customized the sidebar widgets as you want, click on ‘Update’ at the top to save it.

click on update to save widget wordpress widget settings
click on update to save widget

Now, let’s see how it looks on the website.

widget appearance on sidebar wordpress widget settings
Ankit S J B Rana

Ankit S J B Rana

Ankit S J B Rana is a marketing enthusiast originally from the Himalayas of Nepal and currently based out of Bangkok, Thailand.

He is currently the Marketing Director at Mbrella Films and Filma.io

Marketing With WP is Ankit's blog full of marketing insights to turn your website into a 24 hour marketing machine.

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