The Text Widget allows you to add text or HTML to your sidebar. It’s the most popular widget because of its power and flexibility.

You can use a text widget to display text, links, images, HTML, or a combination of these.

Note: Text Widgets fall under the same code security restrictions that posts and pages do, so if you use any code that isn’t allowed, it won’t be displayed.

Here’s an example of what the widget looks like when you just add simple text:

Once you add the widget to your sidebar from Appearance -> Widgets screen, you’ll see that the widget settings look like this:

Widget Visibility

Widgets can be configured to appear only on certain pages (or be hidden on certain pages) by using the Visibility panel.

Visibility is controlled by five aspects: page type, category, tag, date, and author. For example, if you wanted the Archives widget to only appear on category archives and error pages, choose “Show” from the first dropdown and then add two rules: “Page is 404 Error Page” and “Category is All Category Pages.”

You can also hide widgets based on the current page. For example, if you don’t want the Archives widget to appear on search results pages, choose “Hide” and “Page is Search Results.”

Each visibility rule is handled separately. There isn’t a way, for example, to only display a widget on posts that are categorized as “Summer” and also tagged with “Picnic.”

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Delete Widget

If you would like to remove a widget from the sidebar, click the Delete link in the configuration options as show above.

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Adding HTML

If you are unfamiliar with adding HTML into your widget you can learn more about Beginning HTML here or Advanced HTML here.

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Adding an Image

While you can add an image to a text widget using a little HTML we have an Image Widget that makes adding images to your blog’s sidebar much easier. You can learn more about the Image Widget here.