There are so many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without having programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help expand the functionality of your website.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website.
WordPress 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 know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality to parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 WordPress site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- comments
- image banners
- user testimonials
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- product images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that will enhance your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, footer, even below the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide one widget area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WP dashboard and can easily be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays 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. instantly become active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all from your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Active 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 changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) is now located above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few more things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage 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 many edits and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar layout using 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, product 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 provide users with little to no customizable options)
Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize them. 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 …
(Most widgets provide users with configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of useful tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
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