As we have explained in this article, there are so many great benefits in choosing WordPress for managing and growing your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website, or rearrange the site’s layout without the need to have coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to easily insert, delete, and manage content in your site’s sidebar navigation menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
Once you know how to use widgets, you can easily add things to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the WordPress theme you have installed) like:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- clickable ad banners
- customer testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart information
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier)
To learn more about what widgets are, how widgets work and why they make managing your site easier, go here:
In this tutorial series you are going to learn how to use and configure various frequently-used WordPress widgets.
Using Widgets In WordPress
What You Need To Know First
Before we start learning how to configure widgets, let’s make sure that you understand some of the basic concepts about using widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widgetized Areas
Many WordPress themes support widgets and provide built-in widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can use widgets, such as the sidebar, header area, and the footer area. Depending on what theme you are using, widgets can sometimes also be added inside the content area …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)
These widget-ready sections correspond to a feature inside your Widget administration area called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
The Widgets Panel
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays all “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets with drag and drop ease)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
Rearrange WordPress Widgets Using Drag-And-Drop
You can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove widgets by dragging and dropping items inside your Widgets section …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
You can also easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled areas by dragging & dropping widgets.
For example, in the image below, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A ‘click to call’ section from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a plugin that adds an accompanying widget to your site) …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
If you could peek inside the Widget area, you would see that the front-end features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order of these widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar navigation area …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ feature (3) is now first the sidebar, and the ‘contact us’ banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
Deleting Widgets From The WordPress Sidebar Section
Deleting widgets from your sidebar is very easy.
For example, let’s show you how to delete the Search widget from the sidebar section …
(Search widget)
To delete an active widget, you can either expand the widget and click the Delete link …
(Deleting your widget)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets area and drop it into the Inactive Widgets area …
(Remove your widgets)
Repeat this process for any widgets you want to remove from the sidebar navigation area. You can always reactivate a widget by dragging it back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets can be customized. 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Click on the little triangle in the corner of a widget to expand the item …
(Toggles expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, remove the widget from the “Active Widgets” section, close the widget, or click on the triangle to collapse the widget settings …
(Widget settings)
Some widgets may require or offer no customization, or they may only allow you to add an optional title …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Widget Previews
Depending on which theme you have installed on your site, you can also preview any changes live without actually making changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like the customized edits before committing anything to your site.
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 (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(Edit widgets in the Customize section)
When viewing your site on the front-end just calick the Customize link in the toolbar …
(Customize your site quickly)
This brings you to the Customizer section in the back-end.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode (like adding, removing and reorganizing your widgets), and see all changes in real time. If you are happy with the results, click the “Save and Publish” button and the changes will be instantly updated and reflected to your site visitors.
(Widget management – configure widgets on the fly!)
As soon as your changes have been saved, all changes made to widgets will be automatically updated.
Because WordPress Themes can display elements differently on your site, we recommend installing the theme first before configuring widgets.
Also, remember to use the WordPress Customizer to preview all changes. This will save you from having to keep two browsers open while you go through this tutorial (one to work in and one to check how your changes are coming along).
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, let’s configure a number of frequently-used WordPress sidebar widgets.
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This is the end of part 1 of this series of tutorials.
Click here to continue:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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