There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build and manage a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring web coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your site.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in certain parts of your website without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- blog post categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- subscriber form
- image galleries
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and even alter the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further fine-tune your site’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find widget-driven features in the sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header, the footer area, and even below the content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this specific WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, 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 as new WP plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some other things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize 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 the live website.
You can do many edits in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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.
(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 it (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the sidebar 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived posts section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, customer testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, product catalog images, 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 various options that allow you to further customize these. This can include things like 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 give you customization!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 a WordPress newbie, 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 using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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