There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout with no code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, what they do and how widgets can be used to help you expand the functionality of your website.
What Are WordPress Widgets? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box 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 write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections to parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- pages on your site
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- recent comments
- clickable ads
- customer testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed items
- subscription form
- images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- 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 these can add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your site.
As you will see in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further extend your website or blog’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can show up in.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, footer, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, 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 theme shown below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WordPress administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that can be used 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 made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are some other things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the theme that you have installed, 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added 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 inside your 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how information displays 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 …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the site’s sidebar area 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add useful features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS feed content, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add 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 various options that allow you to further customize these. 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 …
(Most widgets give you customizable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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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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