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If you’re new to WordPress, this will take your site to the next level. You’ll love the new flexibility and control you have for customizing your site.
In particular, you’ll learn how to:
- show a widget on your homepage only
- show a widget on one category
- hide a widget on your homepage
- show a widget on one page
- show a widget on one post
The Widget Options Plugin
To control your widget display, I recommend using the awesome Widget Options plugin.
Widget Options makes it very easy to show or hide any widget on any page. It provides a robust set of settings but is still simple to learn and use.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use this plugin to control precisely where your widgets show up on your site.
Let’s start with displaying widgets on the homepage.
How to show a widget on just the homepage
Let’s say you have a Text widget with a welcome message for your visitors. You only want to display it on the homepage.
To do this, you would first add a Text widget to the widget area. With Widget Options installed, you’ll see the following options added to the widget:
To show the widget on the homepage only, switch the Hide/Show option to “Show on checked pages,” check the Home/Front option, and save the widget.
The widget will now only show on the homepage, whether you’re displaying a static page or your posts.
How to show a widget on a category only
Showing a widget on one category is just as easy.
Add your widget, and once again, set the first option to Show on checked pages. This time, click on the Taxonomies tab and then check the box of the category where you want to display the widget.
Lastly, save the widget and its display settings will be updated.
How to hide a widget on the homepage
Instead of showing a widget on the homepage only, you can reverse this and hide a widget on the homepage only.
To hide a widget on the homepage, the options are the same as showing it on the homepage, but this time you switch the Hide/Show option to “Hide on checked pages.”
Now the widget will show on every page except for the front page.
How to show a widget on a specific page
By now, you should have a pretty good idea of how this works.
If you want to show a widget on one page only, you can switch to the Post Types tab, and there you’ll find all of the pages published on your site.
Conclusion
We’ve only scratched the surface.
With the Widget Options plugin, you can hide/show widgets based on the visitor’s device, remove the title for any widget, and add new classes for custom CSS styling. There’s an unlimited variety of ways you can use it to customize the content shown on your site.
Have you tried this plugin? Let us know in the comments how you used it to show and hide widgets on your WordPress site.
