There are loads of great things about choosing WordPress for building, managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains what WP widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help improve the functionality of your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- recent comments from users
- advertisements
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content
- opt-in form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide additional information about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will help further fine-tune your website’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can be added to.
Usually, widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, in the footer area, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have one widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
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 activated for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing 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 delete them all inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the order of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar 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 instantly changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 several things in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 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 discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily 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 …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can improve your site’s user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, customer testimonials or poll results, RSS feed content, 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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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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