Add Widgets to the iPad’s Home Screens

Learn how to add widgets, including stack widgets, to your iPad’s Home Screens.

Did you know you could add widgets directly to the iPad’s home screen? You can stack them and add them to multiple home screens, much like you can on the iPhone. This was introduced with iPadOS 15. Learn about adding widgets to your iPad’s home screens in this video for the iPad.

Video TranscriptAnd this video, we’re going to look at adding widgets to your iPad’s home screen. This was introduced to the iPadOS 15. Let’s go to my iPad.

Now, if you have an iPhone, you know that you can add widgets to your home screen. These widgets could be your latest Mail messages, latest News, or even the Weather. Well, we can now add these same widgets to our iPad home screen. It works very similar to how it works on the iPhone.

All we have to do is just go into our jiggly mode. To get into our iggly mode, I can tap and hold at any one of the app icons. But what I find easiest is to just tap and hold outside of an app icon. When I tap into hold outside of an app icon, it immediately goes into that jiggling mode. We can see that our app icons are joggling.

To add a widget, we just go up to the plus here, and from here I can select from all of my different widgets. So let’s go and add a Calendar. Tap on it. I select which widget I want. We’re going to go with this widget here. I can tap on Add Widget or what I can do is just drag this out and place it where I want.

So let’s go and drag this out. I just tap and hold on it. And then I drag it and I place it where I want. And it goes back to our widgets. Now I can add another widget. Let’s go with our News widget. I tap on. And then I select which widget size I want. And then I just drag it to my home screen again, and I can drag it to a different home screen if I wanted to.

Now, when I drag this, we can stack our widgets. When I drag this, what I am able to do is place it on top of another widget. But if you notice I can’t do that here. So how do I do that? Well, the easiest way is to just place it. And then once you place it, what you’re able to do is drag it on top of another widget. You’re going to see that this has two widgets. When you are finished, you just tap anywhere outside of an app icon. And now you’ve just placed your widget. I’m able to swipe through them because this is a stack.

If you want to edit any one of the widgets, let’s go over to my calendar, I want to edit this particular widget. If you tap and hold on it, you’re going to get a menu. And from here I can edit the stack or I can edit the calendar widget. So I tap on edit Calendar, and now I’m able to set which calendar I want to show in this widget.

If I wanted to edit the stack, then what I would do is I would tap and hold on this again. And then we go over to Edit Stack. When I tap on this, I’m able to edit my stack. I can turn on Smart Rotation as well as add Widget Suggestions. To remove a widget from a stack, you just tap on the minus in the upper left hand corner of the widget you want to remove. I tap outside here again to close it.

So that’s how we work with our widgets on the iPad. As you can see, it’s very similar to how it works on an iPhone, if you have an iPhone. Essentially what we have to do is go into our jiggly mode. I find it easiest to just tap outside of any app icon. If you tap on an app icon, you have to tap and hold a little bit longer because you’re going to get a menu that pops up. But if you just tap outside of an app icon, then what you’re able to do is go directly into that jiggle mode. Once all the apps are jiggling, you just go up to the plus in the upper left hand corner, select which widget you want and drag it onto your home screen. You can drag it to any one of your home screens to stack widgets. You just drag one widget on top of another. You may have to drag it to your home screen in order to get this. In some cases you can drag it directly from where all of your widgets are. And other cases I’ve found that you have to drag it to the home screen first and then drag it on top of another widget. So you may have to experiment with this a little bit, and then if you want to edit your widgets, you tap and hold on the widget and you can select from editing the actual widget that you’re looking at or editing the stack if it’s a stack of widgets.

So that’s how widgets work on the iPad.