There are many benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to expand the functionality of your web site.
What’s A Widget? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP theme 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- blog categories
- post archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertisements
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- subscriber form
- product images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect where widgets display on your site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can further fine tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can display.
Typically, widget-powered features can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header area, the footer area, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WordPress 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use.
The Widgets panel 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the order and 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 show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in the 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 banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some other useful things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
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 any changes to the live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar by switching around 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 help 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, user testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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