ISSUE: Unable to add a widget to a specific widget area/sidebar/interstitial

If you have properly set up your blog feed and enabled the sidebars and interstitial content block areas of your choice, you may add desired widgets to these widget areas by going to Appearance > Customize > Widgets.

If you have landed on the Widgets tab and don't see the widget area you are trying to customize (for example, you want to add a widget to a sidebar but there's no tab connected to that sidebar), please troubleshoot with the following items:

1. Ensure you have properly set up your blog feed.

Some themes require that you enable particular sidebars or interstitials. Review the Blog Feed tab settings in our themes:

2. Check that you are on a page of the Customizer that displays the corresponding widget area

If feeds have been set up correctly, the most common culprit for not seeing a widget area is that you have navigated to a page that does not display that widget area. For example, if you are trying to set up an interstitial content block on your Home Page, but have navigated to a specific blog post within the theme Customizer, you wouldn't see the widget area for editing. 

A good rule of thumb is to check for this message at the top of the Customizer: "Your theme has X other widget areas, but this particular page doesn't display it." It will look similar to this:

Notice in the example above, the Customizer tells you that there are five widget areas that can't be displayed on this particular page of the site. That's because the user has navigated to a single post page in the Hayes theme. So, all widget areas that only appear on the Home Page don't appear, and therefore can't be edited. This is a funny quirk of the WordPress platform Customizer!

3. Ensure you have enough content published

Some widget areas are tied into various blog feed sections. If you do not have enough blog post content published, it is possible the widget area will not register in the Customizer. This is especially relevant for bloggers starting from scratch, and don't yet have a lot of posts published. 

To fix this issue, we recommend publishing a series of sample or test posts, so that your site has enough content to populate each feed, and you can more easily customize the layouts to your liking. Be sure to read our article on creating sample content here.

Once you've customized the site to your liking, you can delete your sample posts later, and begin blogging whenever you're ready.