There are lots of great benefits to using WordPress to build and grow a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without having web coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn how WP widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add new functionality to your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your WordPress site without touching 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- site pages
- site categories
- post archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- post comments
- text ads
- customer testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- subscriber form
- video thumbnails
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide detailed content about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new features to WordPress and change the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further enhance your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added.
Normally, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header, in the footer area, sometimes even below the content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only one widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular 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 three 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 Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located inside your WP administration area and can be easily accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web 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 & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If you could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 on your site.
(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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar area by switching 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising, client testimonials or survey results, RSS content, images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, 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 customization)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize these. 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many useful tips on how to get the most benefit 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:
- WordPress Features Explained – What Is A WP Plugin
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Hopefully, this article has given you 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 the benefits of using the WP web site publishing platform please click on links to visit 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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