There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your site without programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you add functionality to your website or blog.
What Is A WordPress Widget? An Introduction To Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code in certain parts of your website without having to touch any web 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- blog categories
- post archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- text ads
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and change the entire design of your website.
As you will learn in a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further enhance your site’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widget-driven functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header, the footer section, even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only have one widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within your WP admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see 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 panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Use drag and drop to easily reorder the order of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do lots of things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, 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 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 changes (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve 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 web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, 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 additional options that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As you have 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 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 widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP website management platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
***
"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)
***