WordPress Basic Tutorial: How to Use Widgets

Widgets, known as Widgets in English, are a very commonly used feature in WordPress that allows you to easily add content to the website sidebar or footer. This article introduces 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. Therefore,This article uses the example of adding a contact form widget to the website to explain how to use WordPress widgets.

Understanding Widgets

Widgets are located under the Theme menu; in English, it's Appearance - Widgets.After entering the Widgets interface, the left side shows the widgets available for your theme, and the right side shows the positions where your theme supports using widgets.Most themes support widgets in the sidebar and footer, but this depends on the actual situation of the 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 won't be introduced here. After installing Contact Form 7, we enter the Widget 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. Then return to the website frontend, and you can see the contact form widget interface you just added.

Advanced Widget Usage

You can install some plugins to customize widgets, 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 on how to use WordPress Widgets. For more WordPress basics, you can find links on theInstalling WordPress tutorial page.