WordPress Widgets Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress widgets are, how widgets work, and how widgets can help you customize and extend the functionality of your website or blog.

WordPressThere are many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building, managing and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring any programming skills.

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

WordPress widgets

(WP widgets)

This article explains what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you supercharge your site.

WordPress Widgets – How Do They Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Users

WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy

(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)

WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to script PHP code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are made for non-techie users.

Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.

WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code

(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)

Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.

In simple terms, a widget allows you to:

  • Easily add, edit and remove content sections to parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
  • Reconfigure 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:

  • index of pages
  • blog post categories
  • archives
  • menus
  • links to resources
  • links to recent posts
  • recent comments from users
  • clickable ads
  • client testimonials
  • surveys & polls
  • content from RSS feeds
  • subscriber form
  • video galleries
  • social media sharing buttons
  • display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
  • administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and alter the design of your site.

As you will learn in a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will extend your website’s usability.

Widgetized Areas

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.

Typically, widget-driven functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, footer, even below or above the content.

It all depends on what theme you have installed.

For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …

Some WP Themes provide only one widget-ready area

(Some themes only provide a single widget-ready section)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this particular theme only contains one widgetized area …

How Do WordPress Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners

As you can see from the above, the only place 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 in the screenshot below contains multiple widgetized areas …

Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas

(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)

Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …

Multiple widgets areas

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site's footer section

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

How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?

The Widgets area is located inside the WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by going to Appearance > Widgets

A Basic Guide To WordPress For Website Owners: How Do Widgets Work?

This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …

Widgets Section

(Widgets Screen)

The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are available.

The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …

Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)

Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available 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 actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.

Info

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, Categories, etc. to your visitors …

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

(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …

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

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

WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all from your Widgets area using drag and drop …

Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop

(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)

Using drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.

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

  1. A newsletter subscription form,
  2. A click for support banner, and
  3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

Widgets control the order certain features display on your site

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

If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …

A Basic Guide To WordPress For Beginners: What Is A Widget?

If we rearrange these widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …

Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area

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

The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …

WP Widgets: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Beginners

This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …

Widgets are very easy to use!

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Cool, huh?

There are some more things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:

Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer

Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing 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 have 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 – 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 it (and avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site's visitor experience

(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar 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.

Rearrange 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or survey results, RSS feed items, 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 customization

(Some widgets give you little to no configuration options)

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

Many widgets give you customization

(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)

Using WordPress Widgets

As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.

For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips for getting the most out of WordPress with widgets:

Related Posts

If you are new at WordPress, you may also find the following 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see 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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