There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to manage and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your website.
What’s A Widget? Understanding Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features in parts of your website without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- categories
- archived posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable text ads
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in subscription form
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WordPress themes affect where widgets display on your website and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can extend your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, widget-powered features can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in your site’s header section, in the footer area, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only a single widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this 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 WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets section log into your dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays a list of 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 by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all within your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
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 have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some more useful things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual 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 lots of 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’ve 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 errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how information displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized 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 widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, customer testimonials or poll results, RSS feed content, videos, social media buttons, 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 configuration options)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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