How To Get Back WordPress Widgets That Disappeared

I believe many Worpdress users have experienced this inconvenient situation of losing some important widgets, what I mean losing is there’s no Add button on certain Widgets when we want to add them on our sidebar, footer or anywhere. See the following image:

As you can see from the above picture I can’t add get recent comment & popular post widgets as the Add button dissapear. This situation usually occurs when we change our old WordPress theme to the new one and WordPress does not delete the widgets automatically from your previous template after you change it.

And here’s the tips to solve the problem or to get back your disappearing widgets.

1. The easiest solution is by installing Widget reset plugin of Justin Tadlock, this plugin will reset your widgets so you can have them back. You can download the plugin here. It’s recommended to read the readme.html file inside the plugin before you start install & activate it.

2. You can do it manually, actually you can fix this problem without using the above plugin, but it will take a little bit effort, because you need to add an additional code inside your theme’s function.php file to get back your disappeared widgets, here’s the code invented by Justin Tadlock:

<?php update_option( 'sidebars_widgets', $null ); ?>

Put it inside your function.php and update your function.php file, make sure you remove it afterward and update your file again to avoid repetitive reset on your widgets. If you don’t want through of all this problem, you can skip it, and use the plugin.

3. Use another way, if the above 2 steps don’t solve your problem, although I very much doubt about it, you can continue Google about it to find the solution.

Hope it helps you fix the problem & see you again