There are many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for building, managing and growing your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no code editing skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help improve the functionality of your website or blog.
What’s A Widget? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web 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 it all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete sections of code to certain parts of your website without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- post archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- user comments
- clickable text ads
- user testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further extend your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Usually, functions powered by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widget enabled section)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that the WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your WP dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become available for use.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
If we rearrange these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of your 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) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage your 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 many modifications and adjustments to 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.
(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 before publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in widgetized 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 elements using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertisements, client testimonials or surveys, content from RSS feeds, images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 additional options that allow you to further customize things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website or blog 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit out of WordPress with 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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