There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, why widgets are great applications for non-technical users and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your website.
What’s A Widget? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets help 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 form, or a text box or list item to your website.
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 program code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage 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 touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code in certain areas of your site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ads
- user testimonials
- surveys & polls
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter registration form
- images
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website.
As you will see in just a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header area, the footer, sometimes even above or below your content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only a single widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this particular WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used 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 active on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them in your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s 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) is now found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me just show you some other useful things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual WP 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 have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WordPress dashboard 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 changes (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar area 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 your site’s visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, user testimonials or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure these. This includes 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 offer customizing options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using the WP software 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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