There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no programming skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this article you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why widgets are great tools for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your web site.
What Are WordPress Widgets? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WP 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 form, or a text box or item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(Widgets help you control many 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 manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to parts of your website without having to touch any 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 great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- website page list
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- post comments
- image banners
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- customers login section
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and alter the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further fine-tune your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in your site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only location 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 includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is found within the WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
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. become immediately available for use on your site.
The 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.
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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, 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 area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all from your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we took a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage 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 the live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WP dashboard 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 before publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how information displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 the website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archived posts section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, client testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configuration options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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