There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without having any programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website or blog.
WP Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your WP site.
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 have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With WP widgets, you don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to parts of your website without having to touch any web 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- site pages
- categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable ads
- user testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website.
As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find functions managed by widgets in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, footer, even above or below your content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains various widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so 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 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 section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside the WP administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets you have 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 made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new 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 delete them all in your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the layout of your website’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 newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If you take a look inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
If we change the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
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 banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely rearrange how information displays in 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 using widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the sidebar 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets 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 web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or surveys, content from RSS feeds, product images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure things. 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 give you customization!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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 various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of cool tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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