There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website with no coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what WP widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can add new functionality to your web site.
How Do Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WP widgets, you don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your site.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality to certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying 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 things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of pages
- site categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart information
- images
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide detailed content about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can extend your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widget-driven features can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the header area, the footer area, and even above or below the content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have a single widget section)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays 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. become available for use.
Your Widgets area also 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 pre-configured 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, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in 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 graphic button (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are some other useful things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments 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’ve 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!)
Widget management 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 before publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar area 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 with widgets can help 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 customization)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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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