There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application to build and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to improve the functionality of your website or blog.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their website.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality to parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of pages
- blog categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- clickable text ads
- customer testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content
- opt-in form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further fine-tune your site’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, in the footer area, sometimes even above or below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only one widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website 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 WordPress themes provide multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific 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 area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section 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 & 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 immediately active and available 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 retain 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them from your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reconfigure the layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your 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 several edits 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’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 your own dashboard 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widgets in the sidebar by switching 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.
Rearrange 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived content posts section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying image banners, user testimonials or poll results, RSS content, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, 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)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configuration options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many cool 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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