There are many great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for building, managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without requiring any code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your site.
What Is A WordPress Widget? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your website.
The WordPress application 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 have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WordPress widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their website.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to areas of your website without having to touch any underlying 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- recent comments
- clickable text ads
- customer testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- customers login section
- video thumbnails
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can improve your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Usually, you will find features driven by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the header, the footer, even above or below your content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes have only one widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes a number of different widget areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WP 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)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area can be accessed inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays 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 by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
By default, 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them right inside your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now change these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let me show you some more things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize your 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 the live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active 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 WP 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized 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 …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor 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 the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or surveys, RSS feed content, videos, Facebook feeds, 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 offer little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize them. 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 …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips on how to get 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 issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business 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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"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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