I think those of us who have written and maintained blogs for some time probably each have our own preference and selection of sidebar widgets to use by now. But for new bloggers, or for those who are starting to get bored with their sidebars, I want to talk about why it is important to put a little thought into your blog’s sidebar and a few plugins you may want to try.
3 Excellent Reasons to Use a Sidebar
1) Ease of navigation – by providing links to your archived posts, your most popular posts, recent comments, top commenters, your blog’s categories, etc., you make it much easier for your visitors to navigate the blog and find what they are looking for or what might be of interest to them.
2) Lower your bounce rate - by providing plenty of options in your sidebar to other places on your blog where people may want to go, you can keep more people on your site for longer periods of time, therefore reducing your blog’s bounce rate.
3) Advertising space – last but not least, sidebars are an excellent place to use for advertising on your blog if you wish to do so.
One of the Biggest Sidebar Mistakes To Avoid Is…
…clutter! Choose the plugins and widgets that are displayed in your sidebar carefully. Don’t simply add every single widget that looks cool. Keep your visitors in mind when deciding which widgets to utilize, you don’t want them to be frustrated or confused or overwhelmed if they try to find something on your site but your sidebar is so crowded or unorganized that they can’t use it.
5 Widgets That Deserve a Place in Every Sidebar
WordPress Popular Posts is a highly customizable sidebar widget that displays the most popular posts on your blog.
This relatively simple plugin uses Javascript to make the Archive links in the sidebar collapsable by year and/or month.-
This tag cloud plugin lets you configure your sidebar’s tag cloud with many different customization options: font size and color; display your site’s tags OR categories; display the post count for each tag or not; sort order; etc.
Adds links to all of your social media and sharing site profiles. Icons come in 3 sizes, 4 icon styles, and 4 animations.
This plugin provides many advanced search options, a few of which are: site visitors can search for words instead of strings if they choose; allows limiting the search to one or more categories and/or authors as well as user-defined periods; allows setting the search scope to posts, pages and/or comments; search results can be ranked by relevance or date; multi-color searchterm highlighting; and more.
So, those are my recommendations for plugins to try out and use on your own blog. Which plugins do you use and recommend? Which ones have you tried that you would not recommend? Leave a comment and let us know!
@Tia Peterson @TheLibzter It should be called “CLICK HERE!!1!!11!!!” and they should all be blinking.
But seriously, that makes a lot of sense. If you’re not into all this blogging and web stuff and you see “Tag Cloud” you might not know what you’re supposed to do or what will happen when you click the links.
Maybe a brief explanation above the cloud will show people how useful they’re supposed to be (assuming the tags are set correctly and consistently).
@John Garrett @TheLibzter Do you think tag clouds would be used more if they were called “Topics” or “Subjects?” Whenever I come across a blog that has a tag cloud and it’s called something proper like that, I always use it.
@TheLibzter Hey Libby – naw no heat maps here. The tag cloud in WP made a page with it’s own url that had “tag” somewhere in it.
I could just look in Google Analytics and I think I saw those pages pop up maybe once or twice. I was always surprised when I saw them!
@John Garrett
Hi John,
Thanks for commenting! I’m curious as to how you know that no one ever used the tag cloud?? Did you use a “heat map” or something like that?
Also – you’ll have to let me know how turning your whole site into a sidebar goes, ok? haha
@John Garrett
Ok, between the post itself and the comments there’s like 5 different things I need to try now. Thanks for making work for me, lol!
Great article, because my sidebar definitely needs a trim. I used to have a tag cloud in there, but no one ever used it so I removed it.
I might just turn my whole site into a sidebar. No posts or content, just sidebar all day everyday.
I’m just now catching this conversation but what’s interesting to me is that now that tag clouds aren’t being used everywhere, I actually really like them on certain blogs. I think it’s a much quicker way to get to what you’re looking for than a category menu. That said, it only works when the blogger has used tags well.
Right now I am working on getting all my Google Plus links into place in my sidebar, posts and also adding a GooglePlus “join me” card to my blog and website.
@TheLibzter I had more complaints than anything when I used a tagcloud, most people have no idea what they are or how to use them.
Hi Brankica,
I don’t entirely agree that tag clouds are “completely unneccessary” but I do think you have a good point as far as when bloggers dont put any thought into the tags they use. So yes, an unorganized and overflowing tag cloud would be annoying and ineffective, but I personally find a wisely-used tag cloud very helpful since it is a great way to get to a particular subject or topic of blog posts on the site besides simply navigating by category.
Thanks for commenting!
I just would not agree with the tag cloud. It is a completely unnecessary leak from every page on the blog. Especially that most blogs didn’t really “plan” their tags, so they end up linking to a hundred of tag pages with no real plan. This is just from the SEO perspective.
On the other hand, I can’t believe I can still see blogs that don’t have most popular posts in their sidebars. Even relatively new bogs can and should include it in their sidebars. Great one, Libby
Libby,
Boy did I need to read this. I find my sidebar ebbs and flows from cluttered to neat. It drives me nuts. I think I need to print out these tips and keep them in my office. I will have to revisit the plugins you mentioned too. Thanks again!
Hi Evelyn,
I have never tried the Recently Popular plugin but I can see why that would be a great one to use. I may have to try it out on my own blog!
Thanks for commenting!
Hi Libby,
This is very helpful! I will make a few changes. My bounce rate is not good at all. I’ll be adding the Popular posts back to my sidebar.
I use Recently Popular and it works well. It shows the most popular posts that people are reading.
Thanks for the tips!
Evelyn
Hi Tia,
Thanks for mentioning the “widget context” plugin! That sounds like an extremely useful one!
Hi Gera,
I am glad to hear you found some plugins that you want to try after reading this post! You’re very right – some plugins can slow down or break your blog, due to either bad coding or conflicts with a different plugin. But there are enough plugins available that you can usually find one that does what you need.
Thanks for commenting!
Hi Libby,
As a relatively new user of WP, adore this type of posts to improve my learning curve.
Will try with enough time the social widget, don’t like the one I’ve today. Popular posts too.
The only problems more plugins more loading time and possibility of failures…but worth to try…
Cheers,
Gera
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@Tia Peterson @Red Kathy @TheLibzter I just set up Cloud Flare, resetting my DNS servers gave me pause but I am willing to give this system a trial run.
@Tia Peterson @Red Kathy @TheLibzter Thank you, I am off to research CloudFlare and ‘widget context’ now as I need to lower my load time as well, totally intrigued.
@TheLibzter when using the search box you should set it up under your affiliate link through adsense, you might as well get paid for searches and click throughs.
@Red Kathy @TheLibzter @bodynsoil Okay I am so trying CloudFlare now since I’ve heard much about it. And I use the plugin ‘widget context’ which does the same thing as the one you mentioned. I love being able to control everything!
@TheLibzter @bodynsoil To help load time I just recently set up with cloud flare. I noticed the bounce rate a bit lower over the few weeks too. I also use a plugin called display widgets. It allows you to choose what widgets show where on your blog including pages and posts.
Great post, Libby!! May I also add info on the plugin called ‘widget context?’ I love it because it helps to configure your sidebar to display different information based on the page/post. I use it extensively because I know that people like to do different things based on where they are in the blog, and also, because people stay longer on post pages vs home pages. So, I choose the widgets accordingly!
As for page load time, it’s such a pain. The more functionality a site has, the slower it is likely to be unless measures are taken. I’m about to hire out to speed up bizchickblogs because the external javascript and CSS, as well as all of our images, need to be handled better to significantly improve load time. A week ago, we had an ‘F’ for load time according to YSlow. We now have a ‘C’ but it’s still not good enough.
Hi,
I have actually heard of that search box but never tried it myself. I may have to do that now, thanks for the suggestion!
Even though it’s not specifically for Wordpress, the Google Custom Search box is a feature that, I think, belongs on, not only blogs, but on many websites. Even as sites get bigger and bigger, this custom search capability allows the surfer to fetch results very quickly…
Even though it’s not specifically for Wordpress, the Google Custom Search box is a feature that, I think, belongs on, not only blogs, but on many websites. Even as sites get bigger and bigger, this custom search capability allows the surfer to fetch results very quickly…
@bodynsoil
That is a very good point about page load time. A slow page load time will definitely affect your bounce rate because most people are not going to wait more than a few seconds for the page to load before leaving to go to a different site. Thanks for commenting!
The other thought to over populating your blog with widgets and what not is load time. I read that Google does look at the load time when ranking so you want to keep that in mind. I like the widget that BizChicksBlogs is using now that runs along the right side of the post. (most people are right handed so that makes the clicking easier.) You have mentioned a few that I need to check out myself. Thank you.
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