Many premium WordPress themes and plugins come with their own custom widgets that you can add to your sidebars.
For example, you can add a contact form , a custom signup form, a gallery, an email list signup form , and more to a sidebar without writing any code.
Before you create a custom widget in WordPress
When you're learning to code WordPress, you'll need a local development environment. This gives you the freedom to learn and test things without having to worry about your site being live.
You can install WordPress locally on Mac using kuwait telegram data MAMP or on Windows using WAMP .
If you already have a live site, you can move it to a local host. For more details, see our guide on how to move a live WordPress site to a local server .
After that, there are several ways to add your custom widget code in WordPress.
Ideally, you would create a website-specific plugin and paste your widget code into it. This allows you to add WordPress code that is not dependent on your WordPress theme.
You can also add the code to your theme's functions.php file , but it will only be available if the theme is active.
Another tool you can use is the WPCode plugin , which allows you to easily add custom code to your website.
In this tutorial, we will create a simple widget that simply greets visitors. The goal is to get familiar with the WordPress widget class.