There are loads of great things about using WordPress for building and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why they are ideal tools for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website.
Widgets – What Are They? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or item to your site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality to certain parts of your site without having to touch any 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- site categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- comments
- advertising banners
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header area, in the footer area, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide a single widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your WP administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of 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 & 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. become immediately activated for use.
In addition, your Widgets panel 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 pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily reorder the order and layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Active 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 the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in 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 section (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some more things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do lots of things in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around the currently added 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own dashboard 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching 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 with widgets can help 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archived posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or polls, RSS content, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP site 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 various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great tips on how to get the most 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 new at 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 get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of 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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