Starting a new WordPress blog is very easy and anyone can do that. But while creating a blog on WordPress always keep in mind that it is not just about a beautiful design and a text with images.
Most Useful WordPress widgets allow you to add dynamic and static content to the areas that are widget ready like your sidebar, footer, header. You have to make your blog comfortable to work for you and also for your readers.
Most Useful WordPress widgets are one of the best features of WordPress as you can add and extend the functionality of your blog.
There are numerous plugin and templates that enable you to add different kind of widgets like Calendar, Google maps, etc.
To show a widget on your site, you should simply activate the plugin, drag the widget to the suitable widget zone, and afterward configure the widget.
This drag and drop interface make simpler the designing procedure by removing the requirement for altering theme.
In this article, given below are the fifteen most useful WordPress widgets for your website or blog that are extremely useful.
Table of Contents
Date and Time Widget:
Most likely this is one the easiest way for learners to show the current date and time on their WordPress website. This module utilizes the time you have chosen in your WordPress Settings » General page.
You can pick the time and date format. You can also customize the font size, your text colour and even the background colour.
Recent Post Widgets with thumbnails:
As a matter of course WordPress comes with a recent posts widget, which shows a plain and a simplelist of your recent posts on your blog or website. Recent posts widget With Thumbnails enables you to show your latest post with thumbnails.
It also lists the posts with their post titles, experts, authors, dates and many more. It utilizes featured picture or the first picture in a post as a thumbnail.
You can likewise alter the height and width of picture from a widget’s settings screen. This is a simple and effective plugin that is available in other languages like German, Polish, Greek and others.
Google Maps Widget:
Utilizing Google map widget is the simplest method for including a map to your website’s sidebar. If you are tired of large maps, then this simple widget enables you to show a Google map in a widget.
Here you can customize the map size that is the map height and map width. You can also select the type of the map you want like the road map, satellite map or the hybrid map.
At the point when a client taps on the map, a bigger map opens in a lightbox popup.This is one of the best WordPress widgets for business like cafes, restaurants, hotels, etc., who need to show their location and area on their website.
Simple Social Icons:
There are hundreds of social media icons available on WordPress today. This simple social icon is extremely easy and simple to utilize.
This is the easiest customizable way to show icons that will directly link your visitors to your social handles that will increase your visibility. This makes very simple to add social widgets to the sidebar.
You can easily select and customize the colour of the icon that you want, the size, the profile it should be linked to and also the alignment of it, whether it should be left, right or center. All these configuration options are in the widget’s settings.
OptinMonster:
This optinmonster is one great plugin that helps you to capture emails. It helps you to grow your email list and gain more subscriptions with the utilization of popups and various other types of high converting optin forms.
It has an easy drag and drop builder that lets you easily create beautiful forms. Here you can generate different types of campaigns that include WordPress popup forms, floating header, footer bars and more.
It comes with toe widgets that is sidebar and afterpost. These enable you to include high converting subscription forms to your website.
One can also group people in different categories and can display them in different forms on different pages as well. It’s the best for the business who wants to boost their conversions like for eCommerce website.
Tabbed login Widget:
This widget enables you to add a login form to your WordPress sidebar. This widget features three tabs that are a login form, a registration form, and a forgot password form.
It will allow user to quickly login into the website and then redirects them back to the page from which they have logged in from, and it also shows the error messages.
Testimonials Widget:
Testimonials are a great way of raising your profile, your services and your items. This is a best way of displaying your pleased customers and users on your WordPress website.
It allows you to randomly list the chosen portfolios, quotes, reviews, images, text or videos on your website. This WordPress widget helps you to effortlessly create testimonials and you can include them via shortcodes, widgets or theme functions.
Here you can filter slideshow content by tags, categories or post ID. It is designed simply for easy theme adaptation. You add testimonials in your footer section to make it more useful.
Google Calendar Events:
This is the easiest way of adding Google calendar events to your WordPress website. Here you can without difficulty create your events in the Google calendar and then sync the calendar with the plugin to display it on your site.
It has a beautiful design and is also mobile responsive. Here you can customize even content display utilizing basic tags, as no coding is required.
Image Widget:
This widget lets you add image on your website using the native WordPress media manager. In an event that you require to add an image to your website’s sidebar, then in that case you will have to write the HTML in a text widget. While many newbies do not have knowledge about HTML and cannot correctly style the image.
This image WordPress widget solves the issue of the users by enabling to add an image utilizing the media uploader given in WordPress. With this you can add title and description and can also link the image. You can also customize the look and feel with the filters.
Quick Chat:
This is a plugin that supports private chat, avatars, caching plugins, words filtering and much more. It’s the most powerful and highly configurable chat system for WordPress sites.
It is a self-hosted chat solution that is your chat messages are stored in your WordPress database, so it is completely under your control.
You can add this to the WordPress sidebar to add it anywhere on your website as it comes with a widget. It also supports incoming message sound notification for modern browsers.
Related Post Plugin:
It enables you to link your similar post to each other very easily. There are numerous plugin that can do the same, but they are difficult to configure and also make your page heavy.
But with the related post plugin you can do it in just one click, once installed, simply activate the plugin, set the amount of post that should relate and click on the button and it will do the rest. It automatically links the post to each other. You can also manually edit post for better search ranking.
WordPress Popular Post:
This is a highly customizable post plugin that enables you to display your most popular post on your WordPress website in a widget.
You can show your site’s popular post be number of views or by the number of comments, and can also list the post that has been the most popular post within a specific time range. Here you can customize the look and feel of your popular post.
Envira Gallery:
It is one of the best responsive, powerful and user-friendly gallery WordPress widgets. If you are a photographer or are interested, then this is the perfect widget to showcase your gallery in your sidebar.
Here you can organize images in albums, sort them with tags and more. You can also add share buttons, integrated with Instagram, Pinterest and more.
Random Post Widget:
This plugin is utilized to display random posts on your website’s sidebar. You can select the number of random posts you would like to display, also allows the widget to show only a particular category random post.
You can give the title of the widget. You can add this widget multiple times as it supports multiple instance.
YouTube Channel Gallery:
This widget enables you to display your latest YouTube videos on your WordPress website. You can select to utilize this plugin as a widget or as a shortcode.
On the same page you can use multiple instance of this plugin. It has a very nice grid layout, that takes less space and looks more interesting.
Wrapping up
The above given are the best 15 most useful WordPress widgets that every blog must have. We hope that this article helps you in finding useful widgets for your blog or website.
