Widgets and how they look
Adding widgets
Appearance → Widgets, or Customize → Widgets → Sidebar if you want to see the result as you go. The area is called Sidebar; there is only one, and it is described in the admin as “Shown beside the content on any layout set to Sidebar left or Sidebar right.”
Modern WordPress uses blocks in widget areas, so anything you can build in the editor you can put in the sidebar.
How the theme styles them
Widget titles are <h2>s in your heading font — they follow
Design → Typography → Heading and the
H2 size you set there. If your headings
are large, widget titles will be large; that is usually the moment to notice the
H2 size box.
Widget lists — categories, archives, recent posts — borrow the look of the meta line: a notch under body size, in the same face. They deliberately do not follow the Meta color picker, because a colour meant for a byline would repaint the sidebar chrome as well.
Links in a widget are not touched by the content link style — that setting is scoped to links inside post and page copy. A sidebar full of highlighter-marked links would be a lot.
Search forms and buttons use the theme’s own form styling and the border colour.
What is worth putting there
The sidebar stacks under the post on a phone, so everything in it is something a reader meets after they have finished reading — which is a good filter.
Worth it:
- Search — the one widget almost every blog benefits from.
- A short about-the-author block — image, two sentences, a link.
- A newsletter form, if you have one.
- Categories, if you have five or six meaningful ones.
- A “start here” link or your best three posts, hand-picked.
Rarely worth it:
- A tag cloud. Nobody has ever navigated by one.
- A full monthly archive dropdown — the Archives page template does this far better.
- A calendar.
- Anything that loads a third-party script; it undoes the theme’s speed.
Custom CSS
If you want a widget to look different, the sidebar is .secondary, each widget
is .widget, and titles are .widget-title. See
Custom CSS.