There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout with no code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you grow your website or blog.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in certain areas of your website without touching any underlying 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 features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide detailed information about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the entire design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further improve your site’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can appear.
Normally, you will find widgets at work in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header section, footer, even above or below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only have one widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this specific theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “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. become immediately activated for use on your site.
Your Widgets area also 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.
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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them from your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily rearrange the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled 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 button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If you take a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in your 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) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed, you can also customize 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 modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
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 widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can completely rearrange how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help 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 the web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, image galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Many widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
***
"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
***