There are so many great things about using the WordPress web publishing application for building, managing and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without web coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how WP widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can improve the functionality of your site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your 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 learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets don’t require users to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to customize their website.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code to areas of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 many cool things 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:
- site pages
- content categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments
- clickable images
- user testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter subscription form
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect where widgets display on your site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can extend your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, the footer area, even below or above your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide a single widgetized area)
Here is the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 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)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To access the Widgets section go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you can 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 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 activated for use.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them right inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is now found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around 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 to 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how information displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the site’s sidebar 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or surveys, RSS content, videos, social media buttons, 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 give you little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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