Add New Widget Area to theme

This guide will cover how to add a new widget area to a WordPress theme. This will enable you to add widgets to a chosen area of your WordPress website. Note that this differs from simply adding a widget to a pre-defined area, which can be done in the widget settings of your WordPress dashboard.

You should only perform this if you have experience editing WordPress PHP files.

Register a new widget area

Open your functions.php file and add the following code:

function my_custom_widget_area() {
    register_sidebar( array(
        'name'          => 'My Custom Widget Area',
        'id'            => 'custom-widget-area',
        'before_widget' => '<div class="widget-area">',
        'after_widget'  => '</div>',
        'before_title'  => '<h2 class="widget-title">',
        'after_title'   => '</h2>',
    ) );
}
add_action( 'widgets_init', 'my_custom_widget_area' );

You should edit the highlighted names to give your widget area a unique name and id.

Display widget area

The next step is to display your widget area in your chosen location.