There are many great things about using WordPress to build, manage and grow a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your website without web coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, why they are great applications for non-technical users and how widgets can supercharge your website or blog.
WordPress Widgets – What Are They? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help 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 feature, or a script or item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets don’t require users to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance their websites.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your 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 many features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable images
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- product images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further enhance your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widget-driven functions can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, the footer area, even below the content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have a single widget-ready area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that the theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this 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 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)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside your WP admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for 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 made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them from your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout and order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do several edits 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help to 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or survey results, RSS feed content, product images, Facebook 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 provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress web site 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 tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many cool tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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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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