There are loads of benefits to using WordPress to build and grow your 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 having code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how WordPress widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add functionality to your web site.
How Do Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your site.
WordPress 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested list of pages
- blog categories
- archived blog posts
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- clickable ad banners
- customer testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart forms
- videos
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes affect where widgets display on your site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that will help further improve your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, the footer area, even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this particular WordPress 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 includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget areas)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located inside the WP admin area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays 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. instantly become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them right inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily reconfigure the order and layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
There are some other useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several 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’ve 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!)
Widget management 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can completely reorder how content displays in 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 layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the site’s sidebar 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor 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 site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add things like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, customer testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, images, 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 customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site 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 configuration options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress web site 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 site, plus lots of cool 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 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 other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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