There are loads of great things about using the WordPress web publishing tool to build, manage and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help to add functionality to your website or blog.
WordPress Widgets – What Are They? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions in areas of your website 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- content categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- post comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in subscription form
- videos
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will see shortly, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header area, the footer, sometimes even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes have only a single widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that the theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widgetized sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 area)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is found within your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area 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 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all from your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
There are some other things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage 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 your live website.
You can do several things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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’ve 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, videos, social media 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 offer little to no customization)
Most widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize these. 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 …
(Most widgets provide users with configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog 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 different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many great tips on how to get the most 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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