There are so many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no web programming skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your website.
WordPress Widget: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module 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 scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
With WP widgets, users don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality to certain parts of your site without touching 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 features 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 widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- post categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- post comments
- clickable text ads
- user testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS content
- opt-in form
- images
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in your site’s header, footer, sometimes even above or below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widget-ready area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this specific WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP 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 Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within your WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed from the WP dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets area when new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them in your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the 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 the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside the example 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 rearrange the order these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(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 site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, 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 your changes to your live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your active 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 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 before publishing it (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how information displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user 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 site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, customer testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have 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 related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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