There are so many great things about using WordPress to build and grow a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-techies.
With WP widgets, users don’t have to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize their website.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features in certain parts of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- index of pages
- blog categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- clickable images
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- registration box
- images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- 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 plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further extend your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Normally, you will find widget-powered features in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, footer, even below the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only a single widgetized section)
Below is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see that the WP theme only includes one widget 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 different widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen 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-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and available on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order 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 show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar 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 reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is now found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the WP 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WordPress 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 prior to publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar menu 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add useful features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying image banners, user testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Many widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with configurable options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many great 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following related 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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