There are loads of great things about using the WordPress web publishing application for building and growing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your web site.
How Do Widgets Work? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are made for non-technical users.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to customize your website.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality to parts of your website without touching any 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 WordPress site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- content categories
- archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- comments
- advertising
- client testimonials
- polls
- content from RSS feeds
- subscription form
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and change the entire design of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will help further fine tune your site’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Normally, widget-powered functions can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, the footer, even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme that 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 have only a single widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 section)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, 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. immediately become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled 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 contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the 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 image banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize 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 a number of things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange 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 …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar section 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.
Rearrange 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey results, RSS feed items, product images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customization)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP web site 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool tips for getting the most 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, 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 using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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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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