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There are so many benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills and knowledge required.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.

(WP widgets)

This blog post explains how WP widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your website.

How Do Widgets Work? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Owners

(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)

Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website.

WordPress 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 web code.

Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.

WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.

(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)

Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage 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 areas of your site without having to touch any 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 cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:

• website page list
• post categories
• blog post archive
• custom page menus
• links to external sites
• posts that you want to promote
• comments
• advertising
• user testimonials
• survey questions & results
• RSS feed content
• shopping cart information
• product catalog images
• social media share buttons
• display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we write more extensively about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your site.

As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further improve your site’s capabilities.

Widgetized Areas

Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added.

Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, in the footer section, sometimes even below or above your content area.

It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.

For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …

(Some themes only have a single widget-ready section)

Here is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widget-enabled area …

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

In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget areas …

(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)

Here is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WordPress theme …

(Multiple widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)

Where Can I See My Widgets?

The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets area in your browser …

(Widgets Screen)

The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.

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

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the screen.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used on your site.

Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …

(By default, 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 site …

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

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets area using drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)

Drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the layout of your widgetized sections.

For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:

1. A newsletter subscription form,
2. A click for support button, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)

Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget section …

Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar 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 …

As you can see, this immediately 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Easy, huh?

Let me show you some more things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:

Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer

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

You can do many things in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 to your site visitors.

(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)

The ability to manage widgets from within your own WordPress 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged 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 widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.

Reorganize sidebar elements 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add things like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, user testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.

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

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

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

(Most 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 added to your WP website or blog 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different kinds of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WP For Non-Technical Website Owners – What Is A Plugin
• WordPress For Beginners – An Overview Of Themes

Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.

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