Category: WordPress 101

There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring web programming skills or knowledge.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.

(WordPress widgets)

In this blog post you will learn how WP widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your site.

What Are Widgets? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Newbies

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.

With widgets, you don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your website.

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

Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.

In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code to areas of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
• Rearrange how various elements display on ”widgetized” 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 area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:

• website page list
• categories
• blog post archive
• custom menus
• links to resources
• posts that you want to promote
• excerpts of recent comments added to posts
• text ads
• testimonials
• survey results
• RSS feed content
• newsletter registration form
• video
• social media sharing buttons
• display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will improve your website’s functionality.

Widgetized Themes

Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.

Typically, functions powered by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, the footer section, even below or above the content.

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

For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …

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

Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this theme only contains one widgetized area …

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

In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-enabled areas …

(Many themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)

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

(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

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

How Do I Access My Widgets?

To access the Widgets panel log into your administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …

This loads the Widgets area in your web browser …

(Widgets Screen)

The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that can be used 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 by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the screen.

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

The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …

(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your site …

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

Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …

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

Drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your widgetized sections.

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

1. An opt-in form,
2. A contact support banner, and
3. A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …

(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)

Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …

Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …

This instantly changes the layout of the site’s 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …

(Widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty cool stuff, huh?

Let’s go over some other things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:

Widget Management – Widget Previews

Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.

You can do many things in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …

(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widget elements in the sidebar section 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 improve user experience.

Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?

Absolutely!

With many static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or polls, RSS feed content, product images, social media buttons, and more.

While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 customization)

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

(Most widgets offer configuration options!)

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 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:

• WordPress Explained – What Is A WP Plugin
• WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes

Hopefully, now you have 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 for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.

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