There are many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building, managing and growing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help to add functionality to your web site.
What’s A Widget? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your website.
WordPress 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 need to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality in areas 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 cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments
- advertising
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- product images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the entire look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes affect where widgets work on your site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further extend your site’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can be added to.
Normally, features powered by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, in the footer section, sometimes even below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget-ready section)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that the WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 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 Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located within the WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. 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 visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your active 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertisements, testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, product catalog images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer additional 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. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow 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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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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