There are loads of benefits to using WordPress for managing and growing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout with no web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your site.
What’s A Widget? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete sections of code to areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- pages on your website
- site categories
- post archives
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- recent comments from users
- advertising
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- subscriber form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your site.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will extend your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can appear.
Usually, functions managed by widgets can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, footer, sometimes even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widget-ready section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is found inside your WP administration area and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
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 activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and available on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all right inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily reconfigure the 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:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If we could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar section 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 elements using 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add other features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived blog post entries section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, customer testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you 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 for a business website please see our related posts section.
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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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