There are lots of great things about using WordPress for managing and growing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can add new functionality to your website or blog.
What’s A WordPress Widget? An Overview Of Widgets For Beginners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having 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 simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove blocks of code in certain parts of your site without having to touch any 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertisements
- testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter subscription form
- product catalog images
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, functions managed by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, in the footer area, even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget area)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
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 activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and can be used on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your website’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:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is located above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to your 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 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the site’s sidebar menu by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve 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 rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived posts section, menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, videos, social media sharing buttons, 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 provide users with little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 provide users with customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just 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 related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips on how to get 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress 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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