WordPress Basic Tutorial: How to Use Widgets

Widgets, in English, are a very commonly used feature in WordPress, allowing you to easily add content to the sidebar or footer of a website. This article will introduce how to add widgets to WordPress. Yesterday, a foreign trade user added Naiba on WeChat to ask how to add an inquiry window to the website. After detailed communication, it turned out that her actual need was simply to add a Contact Form 7 widget to the website footer. So,This article uses the example of how to add a contact form widget to a website to introduce the usage of WordPress widgets.

Understanding Widgets

Widgets are located under the Theme menu, in English it's Appearance - Widgets.After entering the widgets interface, on the left are the widgets available for your theme, and on the right are the positions where your theme supports using widgets.Most Themes support Widgets in sidebars and footers, but this depends on the actual Theme you are using; not all Themes support Widgets.

Using Widgets

After understanding Widgets, Naiba will now teach you how to use them. Here, we take adding a Contact Form 7 contact form Widget to the website footer area as an example. For the installation and usage of Contact Form 7, refer tothe previous article, which will not be introduced here. After installing Contact Form 7, we enter the Widgets interface.Add a Text Widget to the footer area. There are two methods to add it:

1. Click on the Text Widget, a location selection will appear, choose Footer.
2. Directly drag the Text Widget to the footer area.

Then copy the Contact Form 7 shortcode into it and save. After that, return to the website Frontend, and you can see the contact form Widget interface you just added.

Advanced Usage of Widgets

You can install some Plugins to customize Widgets, in order to display different Widget content on different pages, such as the following ones.

1. Custom Sidebars – Dynamic Widget Area Manager
2. Simple Page Sidebars
3. Content Aware Sidebars
4. Lightweight Sidebar Manager

That concludes the introduction to using WordPress Widgets. For more WordPress basics, you can check the links on theInstall WordPress tutorial page.