Add a Poll to your WordPress Sidebar

Adding a poll to your sidebar in your WordPress site is a great way to get feedback from site visitors and have a little fun at the same time. Here’s how you do it.

First, if you haven’t already, you need to create a poll.

If you’ve already created a poll, you need to be sure that you’ve selected Narrow for your poll width so that it fits nicely in your sidebar. To do that, hover over the title of your poll and click on Edit:

Scroll down a bit, beneath the style selections to select Narrow for your poll’s width. Be sure to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page and click on the blue Update Poll button for your changes to take effect.

Now, login to your WordPress site. If you have a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you’ll need to be sure that you have the Polldaddy Plugin installed.

On the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard, click on Appearance, and then Widgets. You’ll see a list of widgets that you can use for your site. Find the Text widget. Click on it, then drag it up to your Main Sidebar area:

Here’s what the Text widget looks like after you’ve dragged it up to your Main Sidebar area. It opens automatically:

Now, return to your Polldaddy.com dashboard. Hover over the title of your poll and click Share:

Select the WordPress option. Copy the shortcode we supply:

Next, paste the WordPressshortcode into the body of the Text widget. Be sure to click on the blue, Save button:

And that’s all there is to it. Here’s our nifty poll in the main sidebar of our site. Easy as candy, no?

Special thanks to Lawrence Andre for inspiring this post!