There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no code editing skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what WordPress widgets are, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you grow your website.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance their website.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality in parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display on ”widgetized” areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- site pages
- blog categories
- archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable text ads
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart information
- product catalog images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional information about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and even change the design of your site.
As you will see in just a moment, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can improve your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, in the footer area, sometimes even below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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. instantly become active.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Using drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 valuable 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the layout in the site’s sidebar menu by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, videos, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customization)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure 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 information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many cool tips on how to get 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 expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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