There are many benefits to choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your website without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can be used to help you grow your website or blog.
What Are WordPress Widgets? An Overview Of Widgets For New Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
With widgets, you don’t have to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in areas of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 many cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- archived published posts
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- text ads
- client testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically change the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can further fine tune your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, functions controlled by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header section, footer, sometimes even above or below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, 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 theme shown below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is found within your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
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-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them from your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily reconfigure the layout of your site’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 newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & 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 layout of 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) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let me just show you some other things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, 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 lots of edits to 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 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your 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 (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily change the layout in the site’s sidebar menu 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 elements using 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or surveys, RSS content excerpts, product images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customizable options)
Most widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website 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 different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of cool tips for getting 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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