What are the MUST-HAVE widgets?
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I’ve just experimented with widgets today and picked some out. What are the most important widgets to you? Also, what are their functions- I really cannot subject my failing internet to another round of treasure hunting in Support.
Thank you!
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This isn’t really a question for which there are definitive answers. There is a wide variation in blog content and niches and the widgets that may be requried on one blog may not be required on another. Example: If you have a theme that displays dropdown menu for child pages and page tabs then you don’t need to use the Pages widget.
Widgets generally accomplish one or more of the following things:
1. improve the functionality of a site by providing reader accessibility to content that is not located on the front page;
2. act as leaders for e-commerce or other transactions (not applicable to wordpress.com blogs);
3. promote and lead traffic to the third party site serving the widget.As Google is now counting page loading time into ranking of blogs it makes sense not to commit the useful mistake of newbies.. that mistake is overloading sidebars with useless but decorative “tat”. Widgets can be theme destroyers and distractions that attract the eyes of your readers away from your content so select them with care. My test for whether or not to add a widget or any other sidebar link to my blog is to answer this question:
Does it provide access to additional resources to readers thereby enhancing their reading experience?
My rule of thumb is that if it does not accomplish the foregoing, then do not add it.
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To me, the most must-have widget is Search:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/search-widget/Of course, every blog is different, and what’s essential for one blog may be irrelevant for another. For example, you might be a tagoholic, and so need the Tag Cloud widget, while another blogger might never use tags.
But I find it hard to imagine a blog that’s not better for a search function.
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@Andrew
Good choice. Although I provide a search widget for reader use, I don’t use it to search my blog. The search widgets on our blog are not very good tools. I use Google and it provides specific and relevant results that does not lead to me clicking and clicking over and over to find a specific post in entirety. -
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Thanks timethief… ditched of two or three widgets only to supplant them with the Search widget (thanks andrew!). I didn’t even realise Search was there after all the experimenting.
:D
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@quixoticzephyr
I’m happy to hear my comment was helpful. As I said above newbies are inclined to fill their sidebars with decorative clutter that does not provide additional resources to their readers, and page loading time is a ranking factor.Mu advice is to aim to have the bare minimum of widgets required for your readers to reach the contents of your site that’s not being displayed on the front page, and to reach selected high quality resources beyond your blog.
If your publish posts frequently then consider using “the more” tag to split post content so only teasers are displayed on the front page and “read more” links are supplied to the readers. This allows they to choose to click on the “read more” links in the posts they are most interested in reading. http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/ Also note that as your most recent posts are displayed on your front page there may not be a need to use the Recent Posts widget.
You can also consider reducing the number of posts on the front page so readers do not have to scroll and scroll and scroll. > Settings > Reading
Find: “Blog pages show at most ___ posts”
Change the number of posts and scroll down to click “Save Changes”
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