There are many benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can improve the functionality of your website.
WordPress Widget: A Basic Guide To WordPress 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 functionality, or a text box or 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 to a website, you need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 many additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- website page list
- blog categories
- archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- subscriber form
- videos
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new functionality to WordPress and alter the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can further extend your site’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, functions controlled by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header section, footer, sometimes even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widget area)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes various widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WP administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel 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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If we take a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
There are some more things about using WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and 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 your live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, 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’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!)
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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s 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 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 site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like 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 recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configuration 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 site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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