How To Take Advantage Of Your WordPress Sidebar
Do you want to have certain amount of content or links or images to be constantly displayed on each and every page of your website? If you answered ‘yes’ to this question, then your WordPress sidebar is the perfect place to find all your answers!
Today, lets look at how you can take advantage of your WordPress sidebar to display certain content continuously across all your website’s pages and blog posts.
Your WordPress website has a unique and amazing feature: the WordPress sidebar, which can be very effectively used to display a variety of links and content across all the pages of your website.
WordPress Sidebar: What and Why
Before we delve into the the ‘how-to’ aspect, lets take a quick look at the ‘what’ and ‘why’ aspect of this scenario.
- You might want to display a quick blurb ‘About’ you on every page of your website.
You might want to put a bunch of links on every page of your website. These can be links to your favorite sites, or other things such as important pages on your website.- You might want to show an image or a slideshow of images on every page of your website. (This comes in handy when you have a website dedicated to images or photographs, for example.)
- You might want to put links to your social media profiles on the Internet.
- You might want to show off your ‘featured’ products – comes in handy for a shopping website.
- You might want to put a ‘Buy me Coffee’ button or a ‘Donate’ button on your website.
As you have seen, the list of things you might want to display continuously on your website can go on and on. And the reason for having this information on your website’s sidebar is really quite simple:
- Give your website’s visitors instant access to the information you want to highlight.
- Give your website’s visitors a quick glance at certain pertinent information that you want to highlight across your entire website.
WordPress Sidebar: How-To
So, with that quick overview, let us go ahead and look at the various ways you can leverage your WordPress sidebar to make this possible. And the best way you can go about it, is by using your WordPress website’s ‘widgets’ feature. There are a number of built-in WordPress sidebar widgets that come pre-installed with WordPress. Apart from those, you can also install a variety of WordPress sidebar widgets into your WordPress website.
To go to your WordPress website’s widgets section, just navigate to the ‘Appearance’ menu item and click on ‘Widgets’.
WordPress Sidebar Widgets
Without any further ado then, lets look at some of the most useful WordPress sidebar widgets that can make these things happen for you.
Social Media Widget
I have already talked about this widget over here. This WordPress sidebar widget will put in a wide variety of social media links into your WordPress sidebar and help your website’s visitors connect with you across a number of social media websites.
NextGen Gallery Widget
I have written a great how-to post about this widget over here. This plugin also gives you a WordPress sidebar widget, where you can put in a slideshow of your albums or image collections in your WordPress sidebar.
Text / HTML Widget
This is a built-in widget which will help you insert any arbitrary text or html code into your WordPress sidebar. This widget comes in handy when some some websites provide code that needs to be placed in the sidebar of your website.
Pages & Links Widgets
These are 2 separate, built-in widgets. The Pages widget will put links to all your website’s pages in the sidebar, while the Links widget will put the links from your blogroll in the sidebar.
Meta Widget
Another built-in widget, this will put your site’s login and admin links in your WordPress sidebar.
RSS Widget
This built-in, configurable WordPress sidebar widget pulls in RSS feeds from different websites and displays them in your WordPress sidebar. This widget can be quite helpful for those of you who want to display certain news items from other websites on your website.
MailChimp Widget
Although MailChimp provides you with a bunch of code that you can insert into your WordPress sidebar, you can’t quite configure certain aspects of it. Enter the MailChimp Plugin, which allows a lot more in terms of configurability. Now your website’s visitors can easily find your ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ form on your website!
Twitter Widgets
And if you are a twitter user who wants to show off your tweets and so forth, here are 2 of my favorite Twitter Widget Plugins – Twitter and Twitter Goodies – which you can use, depending on how simple or how complex you want your display to be like.
PayPal Donate Button
This amazing PayPal Donate Button Plugin can really come in handy if you want to put that ‘Donate’ button on your WordPress sidebar.
As you can see, this list is virtually endless too! Ahem! So I think I’ll just stop here.. ;)
In Conclusion…
There are many good reasons why you would want to display a certain amount of or type of content in your WordPress Sidebar, and just as well, there are a plethora of plugins available freely which you can use to put that content in your WordPress sidebar.
So what kind of content do you usually display in your website’s sidebar? What else would you like to display in the WordPress sidebar? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below.
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