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There are loads of great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring programming skills.

WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you improve the functionality of your website or blog.

WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)

WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website.

The WordPress application 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 PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.

WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.

(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)

Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:

• Easily add, edit and delete functionality in parts of your site without touching any web code, and
• Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 many functionality 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 WordPress widgets:

• pages on your site
• site categories
• archive
• menus
• links to resources
• posts that you want to promote
• comments
• clickable ad banners
• testimonials
• surveys & polls
• RSS feed items
• opt-in form
• video
• social media sharing buttons
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other articles, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website or blog.

As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website or blog’s functionality.

Widgetized Areas

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can display.

Normally, features managed by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, in the footer section, sometimes even below the content.

It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.

For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …

(Some WP themes provide only one widgetized section)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that this theme only contains one widget area …

As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.

In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget-enabled areas …

(Many themes provide a number of widgetized areas)

Here is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 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)

Where Can I See My Widgets?

The Widgets screen is located inside the WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the WP dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets section in your browser …

(Widgets Screen)

The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.

On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become activated for use on your site.

In addition, the Widgets screen 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.

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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …

(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …

(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)

Widgets Features: Drag & Drop

WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)

Using drag-and-drop 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:

1. An opt-in form,
2. A click for support button, and
3. A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)

If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …

Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag & drop …

(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …

This instantly changes the layout of your 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 image banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Cool, huh?

Here are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:

Widget Management – Preview Widgets

Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.

You can do many edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 to your site 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 manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar area 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.

Reorganize sidebar layout with 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add things like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or poll results, RSS content excerpts, videos, social media buttons, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets provide users with little to no configuration options)

Many widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

(Many widgets offer customizing options!)

Using WordPress Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WordPress Features Explained – WordPress Plugins
• WordPress For Beginners – An Introduction To Themes

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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