There are so many great things about using WordPress for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, what they do and how widgets can help you supercharge your site.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in areas of your website without touching any code, and
- Rearrange 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 great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- site pages
- post categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- clickable text ads
- client testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed content
- member login section
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide additional information about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your website’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header, footer, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains various widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas the 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WP administration area and can be accessed from the administration menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(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 and 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. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widgetized 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 opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek 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 the active widget section …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage 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 many edits and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all 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 to visitors.
(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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived posts section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or surveys, RSS content, image galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer additional options that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips on how to get 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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