There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress to build and manage your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no coding skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how WP widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add functionality to your website.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete blocks of code to certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 features you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog categories
- archived blog posts
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- recent comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- polls
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website.
As you will soon discover, WP themes affect where widgets work on your website and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can improve your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, features managed by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the header area, footer, even below the content section.
It all depends on what 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 provide only one widgetized area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget-enabled 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 WordPress theme shown below includes a number of widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 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 section is located inside the WordPress administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become available for use.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop you can easily rearrange the layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now change these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in the 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 graphic banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
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 errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the site’s sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve visitor 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or surveys, RSS feed content, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform 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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