There are loads of great benefits to choosing WordPress for building and growing a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how WordPress widgets work, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help to grow your website.
What Are Widgets? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress application 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 need to know how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions in areas of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- advertisements
- client testimonials
- polls
- RSS feed content
- subscription form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can show.
Typically, you will find widget-powered features in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header area, the footer area, even below or above your content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only one widget-ready area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside the WordPress administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
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 activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately activated for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily reorder the layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
There are some other useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WP 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 it (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar menu by switching 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor 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 rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add useful features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived blog post entries section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS feed content, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Many widgets provide various settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we 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 tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips for getting 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 related 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 the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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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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