There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without having web programming skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains how WP widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can grow your website.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or menu item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With WP widgets, users don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance their websites.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete sections of code in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display 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 (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- site categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content
- registration box
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can improve your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, features powered by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the header, in the footer section, even below your content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes have only a single widgetized section)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this particular WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several 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 site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reconfigure the order of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we could peek 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 their active widget area …
Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also 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 your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 before publishing changes (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar area by switching around 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 elements using widgets can help improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertisements, testimonials or poll results, RSS content, video thumbnails, Twitter 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 give you little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips for getting 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this article 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 WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
***
"I love the way your email series "Infinite Web Content Creation Training Series" is documented and presented. It is very absorbing and captivating. The links and tutorials are interesting and educational. This has motivated me to rewrite my content following the concepts I am learning from the email series." - Mani Raju, www.fortuneinewaste.com
***