There are lots of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for managing and growing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no coding skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to grow your site.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting 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 like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions to areas of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of your web pages
- site categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- advertising
- testimonials
- survey results
- content from RSS feeds
- subscription form
- product images
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further extend your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.
Typically, you will find functions controlled by widgets in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, the footer, even below the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only have one widget-ready section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location 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 contains various widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within your WP administration area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes 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) is now located above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are some more useful things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage your 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 several things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing the currently added 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your dashboard 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 errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how information displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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 with widgets can help 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 rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add other features like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Many widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configurable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress 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 various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
***