There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build and grow your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what WordPress widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to supercharge your site.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your website or blog.
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 learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to see, WP widgets are made for non-technical users.
With widgets, you don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code to certain parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- content categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments
- advertising banners
- user testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your website.
As you will learn shortly, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can show.
Normally, features managed by widgets can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header area, footer, and even below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget areas)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within your WordPress administration area and can be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some other things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage 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 edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around 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’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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WordPress 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 prior to publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content 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 elements using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching 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 layout using widgets can improve user 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising, testimonials or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customization!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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 website, plus lots of great tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have 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 website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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