Sidebars are very important areas on your website. If organized correctly, they can help you generate leads, provide a great user experience and increase revenue.
Widgets (small blocks, mostly in sidebars, that perform special functions) can improve your site aesthetically and functionally.
When choosing which widgets to use, you need to follow the goals of your site. Widgets must reflect these goals completely. Otherwise, widget overuse may confuse or even push your visitors away. That’s why you need to take the choice of widgets wisely.
In this article, we will look at some of the most important widgets for you to choose from.
Add an Opt-in Form
Whichever kind of business you have, the possibility of turning occasional visitors into regular customers can hardly ever be overrated. Subscriber plugin adds a widget to your sidebar. This widget collects your WordPress site visitors’ e-mails. This gives you an opportunity to communicate with your target audience directly.
Use Google Maps
If it is of great importance for your online audience to know your location and how to get there, make use of the Google Maps widget. It adds a fully customizable map with precise marker location, map style, and language selection and many other options.
Add Related, Featured, Latest and Popular Posts
By doing this, you will keep your visitors engaged with your content for longer. Relevant – Related, Featured, Latest, and Popular Posts plugin will add a highly customizable widget to make your posts look exactly what you want them to. Connect your readers with a relevant content!
Promote Social Media
Social media is a very flexible and incredibly powerful tool to promote your business. Social Buttons Pack is an easy-to-use plugin that adds Twitter, Facebook, Google+1, Pinterest, LinkedIn widgets, buttons and badges to your WordPress site. Adding this social media widget to your sidebar means that your Follow, Like and Share buttons will always be visible to your visitors. Increase shares and social media engagement today!
Feed Them Social – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube & Pinterest is another one social media plugin. It allows to create and display feeds for Facebook pages, groups, events, photo albums, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. on your sidebar.
If Instagram is enough for you, you can try out Instagram Feed. It helps to display photos from any non-private Instagram account (single or multiple). There is a lot of display settings available. This plugin also saves your time as you only post your photos to Instagram and they are automatically displayed on your website.
Social Count Plus widget allows you to easily display your social media follower count in your sidebar. This will help you to build trust from your new visitors.
Make It Look Right
Slider plugin adds responsive and fully functional sliders to your website widgets, pages, and posts. It allows you to add an unlimited number of images, videos and slider categories as well as to create and configure slides, set captions, and URLs. Simply put, it helps to create beautiful sliders that fit all your needs!
Envira Gallery and BestWebSoft Gallery are responsive gallery plugins to create beautiful sets of images. Such plugins are especially helpful for photographers and photo-enthusiasts, as they allow to showcase photo galleries in a sidebar widget.
YouTube Widget Responsive is another great widget that helps to display YouTube videos in your sidebar. This plugin also boasts a great variety of adjustments.
And if you need to create a custom taxonomy and not just categories, List Custom Taxonomy Widget will be especially handy, as it is a quick and easy way to place your custom taxonomies in your sidebar.
Add Testimonials
Testimonials Widget is a nice way to show off your satisfied clients and customers. Testimonials are one of those widgets that you can add in your footer area to make it more useful.
In conclusion, we would like to stress once again, that choosing which widget to use is quite individual. And while deciding on ones out of many, you must not forget, that each widget must be specifically relevant to your site goals.
