There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no programming skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
WordPress Widgets – What Are They? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a web 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 web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WP widgets, users don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their websites.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete blocks of code in areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- site pages
- blog categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertising
- customer testimonials
- survey results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in subscription form
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, you will find features controlled by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header, in the footer area, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide one widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 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)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section can be accessed inside the WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used 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-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and available.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If you take a look 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 they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) is found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some other useful things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do several edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing your active 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your WordPress 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 errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can completely reorder how content displays 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-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help 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 website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising, customer testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)
Most widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many great tips on how to get 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 a new WordPress user, 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 build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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