There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, why widgets are great tools for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your web site.
WP Widget: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or menu item to your website or blog.
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 need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple 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 remove features in certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog categories
- archived posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- surveys
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- videos
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website.
As you will see in a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will extend your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, features powered by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, the footer section, even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found inside the WordPress admin area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain their 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to 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 will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all from your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily reorder the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s 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 reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do many things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added 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!)
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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar by switching around 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to 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 many static 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 subscriber forms, or just add other features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, custom page 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 ads, quotations or poll results, RSS content excerpts, product images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For 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 web site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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, 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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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