There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without having programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn how WordPress widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can expand the functionality of your website.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in certain areas of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your theme 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- user comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- opt-in subscription form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even change the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that will enhance your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, you will find features controlled by widgets in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header, footer, even below or above the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget-ready section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several 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 Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some more useful things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do lots of things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you’ve 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your dashboard 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the order of elements in the sidebar section 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 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 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 shopping cart information sections, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived posts section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, user testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, product catalog images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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