There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can grow your website.
Widgets – How Do They Work? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections to parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- post categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS feed items
- member login section
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole design of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can further improve your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can appear.
Usually, features managed by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header section, the footer area, and even below or above the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only one widgetized area)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be easily accessed inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, 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 areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all right inside your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reconfigure the layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is now located above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, 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’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 own WP dashboard 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 it (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the layout in the sidebar section by switching around 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve 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 website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add useful features like a list of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, user testimonials or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 configurable options)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize your site features. 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!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most 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, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress content management platform please see our related posts section.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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