There are lots of benefits to choosing WordPress to build and manage your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout with no coding skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your site.
What Are Widgets? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, 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 have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code in certain areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- website page list
- site categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- recent comments from users
- image banners
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- subscription form
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional information about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the design of your site.
As you will see shortly, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can extend your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can appear.
Typically, features managed by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the header, the footer section, and even below your content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide a single widget-ready area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see that the theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-enabled areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WP admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel 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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the layout and order of your website’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 subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
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 order these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is now located above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress 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 many edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within 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 before publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar area 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived blog posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, customer testimonials or poll results, RSS feed content, image galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you 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 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 great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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