There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can add functionality to your web site.
What Are WordPress Widgets? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets 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 list item to your site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 many cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog categories
- archived blog posts
- menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments
- advertisements
- user testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- newsletter subscription form
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other 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 plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and change the entire design of your site.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, widget-powered functions can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in your site’s header section, the footer, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes have only a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within the WP admin area and can be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily rearrange the order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage and 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 your live website.
You can do lots of things in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around the currently added 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 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived published posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, videos, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful 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, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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"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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