There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for building and managing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what WordPress widgets are, what they do and how widgets can grow your website or blog.
WP Widget: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions in certain parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of pages
- site categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- image banners
- user testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can extend your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in the sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the header, in the footer, even below or above the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes have only one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WordPress admin area and can be accessed from the dashboard menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all from your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact 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 WordPress site)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
If we change the above widgets in the Active 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 instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all 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 to your site 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 it (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar by switching 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or poll questions & results, content from RSS feeds, images, 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize things. 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 give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website or blog 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WP software please see our related posts section.
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