There are many great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build, manage and grow your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no code editing skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your website or blog.
How Do Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any web 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- archived posts
- menus
- links to resources
- most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable images
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, WP themes affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, the footer, sometimes even below or above your content.
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 displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget enabled section)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that the WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 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)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is found within the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you have 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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active.
Your Widgets area 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 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your widget-enabled 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 subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside this 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 their active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of 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 graphic banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are some more things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current 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 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, 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 items, image galleries, social media sharing buttons, 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer a number of 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 give you customizable options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s 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 boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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