The Text Widget allows you to add text and HTML to your sidebar. It’s the most popular widget because of its power and flexibility — use one to display text, links, images, or any combination.

Note: Text Widgets fall under the same code security restrictions that posts and pages do, so if you use any code that isn’t allowed, it won’t be displayed.

Text Widget Basics

Here’s an example of what a text widget displaying some simple text:

The font and appearance of text widgets varies by theme, so yours will look different. This example is from the Nucleare theme.

Add a text widget to your sidebar or footer by going to My Site(s) → Customize→ Widgets. Click on the name of the sidebar or footer where you want the widget to appear, then click the Add a Widget button:

Next, use the search field provided to find the text widget, then click the widget title to add it to the sidebar:

Enter your title and content. If your text is multiple paragraphs, check Automatically add paragraphs to insert paragraph breaks without needing to enter any HTML.

As you enter text, you’ll see a preview of the widget appear on your blog.

When you’re satisfied, click Save and publish to add the widget to your live site.

 

 

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Widget Visibility

Widgets can be configured to appear only on certain pages (or be hidden on certain pages) by using the Visibility panel.

 

Visibility is controlled by five aspects: page type, category, tag, date, and author. For each one, you can opt to Show (the widget appears only in the designated area) or Hide (the widget appears on all pages except the designated area). To prevent this text widget from showing on individual posts, we can tell it to hide the widget whenever a page is a single post:

 

Each visibility rule is handled separately. There isn’t a way, for example, to only display a widget on posts that are categorized as “Summer” and also tagged with “Picnic.” However, you can add multiple rules to each widget — click Add to create additional rules.

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Delete Widget

If you would like to remove a widget from the sidebar, open the widget’s settings and click the Delete link:

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Adding HTML

If you are unfamiliar with HTML, you can learn more about Beginning HTML or Advanced HTML.

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Adding an Image

While you can add an image to a text widget using a HTML, you also have an Image Widget that makes adding images to your sidebar much easier. Learn more about the Image Widget.