There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no code editing skills and knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
What Are WordPress Widgets? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your WP site.
The WordPress application 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 know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
With widgets, users don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of their website.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions in parts of your site without touching any underlying 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 cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- post categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- text ads
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- content from RSS feeds
- registration box
- video
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn in a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, the footer, and even below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes have only one widget-ready section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this particular 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 section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Here is the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WordPress 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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 available 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 pre-configured 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WordPress 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, rearrange and delete them all in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily rearrange the layout 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 show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, 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 display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let me show you some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize 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 technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the layout in the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived blog post entries section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, user testimonials or survey results, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, social media buttons, 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 customization)
Many widgets provide a number of settings 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with configurable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 site, plus many useful tips on how to get 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-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 the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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