There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage 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.
(Widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your site.
WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon see, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 many features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- content categories
- blog post archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- clickable ad banners
- customer testimonials
- polls
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart information
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide additional content about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further extend your website’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can be added.
Typically, widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header section, in the footer, even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only one widget enabled area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for 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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them within your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily rearrange the layout and order of your website’s widgetized sections.
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 button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the 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) is located above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let me just show you some more useful things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar section 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve 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 the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived content posts 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, quotations 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 configurable options, 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)
Many widgets offer additional options 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress web site 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many 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, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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