There are so many great benefits to using WordPress for building and growing a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without having web coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn what WP widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help expand the functionality of your web site.
What Do Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To Widgets For New Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, 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 that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete blocks of code to areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- pages on your site
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- advertising banners
- quotations
- polls
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide detailed information about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Typically, you will find features managed by widgets in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header area, in the footer, and even below or above your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have one widget-ready section)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, 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 theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within your WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets you have available.
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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some other useful things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around 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!)
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 before publishing any changes (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the order of elements in the sidebar area 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or poll results, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following 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 WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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