There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing software for managing and growing your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can supercharge your site.
Widgets – What Are They? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions to areas of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your theme on widget-enabled areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS content
- subscription form
- images
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will enhance your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can show.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header area, the footer area, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your WordPress administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and available.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets (e.g. widgets for displaying your pages, links, posts, post categories, adding text, adding RSS feeds, adding tags, adding a search box, etc …) and active widgets.
These widgets are available in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few more things about using WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you have done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management is a great feature of WordPress. You can work in preview mode inside the WordPress Theme Customizer screen (Appearance > Customize) and see how your widget content will appear prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the layout in the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, quotations or surveys, RSS content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting the most out of WordPress using widgets:
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 1
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 2
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 3
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 4
Related Posts
If you are a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress software please see other posts we have published on this site.
***
"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
***