As we discuss in this post, there are many benefits in using WordPress to manage and grow your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website, or rearrange the site’s layout without programming skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage content on your website’s sidebar (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
Once you know how to use widgets, you can easily add things to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) like:
- site pages
- site categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- comments
- image banners
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- member login section
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy)
To learn more about what WP widgets are, how they work and how using widgets can help you expand your site’s capabilities, see this article:
In this tutorial you will learn how to use and configure a number of commonly-used WordPress widgets.
How To Use WordPress Widgets
Basic Concepts
Before we get into configuring and using widgets, let’s first make sure that you understand some of the basics about how to use widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widgetized Areas
Many WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear, such as the sidebar, header area, and the footer area. Depending on what theme you are using, widgets can sometimes also be used in the content area …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
These widgetized areas correspond to a feature inside the Widget screen called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
The Widgets Panel
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see all “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
Reorganize WordPress Widgets With Drag-And-Drop
You can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete things using widgets by dragging and dropping items from your Widgets section …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
You can also easily reorder the layout of your theme’s widgetized sections using drag-and-drop.
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 contact support banner, and
- A ‘click to call’ feature from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a plugin that adds an accompanying widget to your site) …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we look inside the example site’s Widget area, you will see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar section …
This instantly changes the layout of the site’s sidebar.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s user experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar, and the ‘contact us’ section (2) is found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
Removing Widgets From Your Sidebar
Deleting widgets from your sidebar navigation section is very easy.
For example, let’s delete the Search widget from the sidebar navigation area …
(WordPress Search widget)
To remove a widget from an active Widget area, you can either open up the widget and click the Delete link …
(How to delete your widgets)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets area and into the Inactive Widgets section …
(Removing your widgets)
Repeat this process for any widgets you want to remove from the sidebar. You can always reinstate a widget by dragging it back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Clicking on the little triangle in the corner of a widget expands the item and displays the widget’s settings …
(Toggles expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, delete your widget from the “Active Widgets” section, close the widget, or click on the triangle to collapse the widget …
(Widget settings)
Some widgets give you little to no configuration options, or they may only allow you to add something like an optional title …
(Some widgets offer little to no customization)
Widget Customizer Section
Depending on which theme you use, you can also preview any changes live without making actual changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like the customized edits before committing anything to your website.
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 change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(Edit widgets in the Customize section)
If you need to make changes to the site while viewing the frontend, just click on the Customize link …
(Customize link in the toolbar)
This brings you to the Customizer screen in the backend.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode (like adding, deleting and moving widgets around), and it will all be done in real time. If you like what you have done, click the “Save and Publish” button and the changes will instantly become visible on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – configure widgets on the fly!)
As soon as your changes are saved, all changes made to widgets will be automatically updated.
Since WordPress Themes can display elements differently on your site, we recommend that you install the theme first before configuring widgets on the sidebar area.
Also, remember to use the WordPress Customizer to preview all changes. This saves you from having to keep two browsers open while you complete this tutorial.
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, it’s time to learn how to begin configuring various frequently-used WordPress widgets.
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This is the end of part one of this tutorial on how to use Widgets.
To view the rest of this tutorial, click this link:
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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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