There are many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types 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)
This post explains what WordPress widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help to supercharge your site.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your WP site.
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 have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to customize their websites.
(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions in parts of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- website page list
- blog categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- survey questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter registration form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further enhance your site’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can show.
Typically, widget-powered features can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header, footer, even above or below your content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widgetized areas)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 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 Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area as 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
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the 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:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If you could peek inside this 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 the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some other things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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’ve 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your dashboard 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 (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely reorder how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can 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 rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or survey results, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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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