There are many benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no web coding skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WP widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to expand the functionality of your website or blog.
WP Widgets: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to customize their website.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to certain parts of your website without having to touch any web 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 many great things 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 WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- post categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus that display only the pages you choose
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ads
- testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in subscription form
- images
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can further extend your site’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header, the footer, even below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget-enabled 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 section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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 areas of the widgets screen.
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 screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking 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 their active widget bar …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, 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 first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some more things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual 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 see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments 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 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WordPress dashboard 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived published posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, quotations or survey questions & results, 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 provide users with little to no configurable options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool tips for getting the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-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 using the WP software please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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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