5 Widgets You must have on Your WordPress Sidebar

The order of your blog sidebar is important. You don’t want viewers blindly stumbling around looking for everything because one thing they won’t do is look for long. In fact not longer than a few seconds. Their attention span is brief. Give them what they want and where they expect it.

This is the expected order of a sidebar and for good reason:

1)         Optin form

If a viewer has just read your inspiringly wonderful post, they will want to subscribe and will go looking for it in the conventional place – at the top of the sidebar.

2)         Social Media Icons

You want your viewers to be able to connect with you on social media so give them an easy way to do that. Customize these icons if you want but not so much that viewers don’t recognize them at a glance. I repeat, don’t make things difficult for them. Make sure they open in new windows or you have lost your viewers from your blog and that is exactly what you don’t want because if they haven’t subscribed yet, they sure are not going to now.

Don’t place more than 4-5 icons here. Research shows that if people are given too much choice, they do nothing. Place your main social media networks here like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

3)         A search widget

Give your viewers a way to search for what they need. If they can’t do this, they will leave in frustration.

4)         Popular posts

Once you have a viewer on your site, you want them to stay as long as possible and to have a look around so you have to give them ways to do this. Use a widget which includes images and a title. Words alone are not as effective because on the whole people are visual and like to see a photo which intrigues them enough to click on the link. You will have to make sure that every post has an image or you will get a blank square, which looks lonely and uninviting.

5)         A Facebook widget

Use this one only once you have more than 1,000 likes on your Facebook page. It is a form of social acceptance. If you have 1,000+ likes, then you should be taken seriously. You can choose the size of the widget and you also choose whether to show faces or not but do show the number of likes you have. This widget will become available under Appearances/widget once you have activated “Extra Sidebar Widgets” in Jetpack.