There are lots of great things about using the WordPress web publishing software to build and manage a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website with no programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help to expand the functionality of your website.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality in parts of your website without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your theme on ”widgetized” areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- post comments
- clickable images
- client testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- images
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header area, footer, even below the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only one widget-ready section)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 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)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your WP admin area and can be accessed from the WordPress administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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 areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and can be used on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget area …
If we change these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of the site’s 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 to your site visitors.
(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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily rearrange how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user 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 the site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying image banners, customer testimonials or surveys & polls, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, social media share 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 provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customization!)
Using Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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