There are loads of great things about using WordPress for managing and growing a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can enhance the functionality of your website.
What Are WordPress Widgets? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give 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 sections of code to certain areas of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- blog post categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- image banners
- testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed content
- subscription form
- video thumbnails
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can extend your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Normally, you will find widget-powered features in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, footer, sometimes even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widget enabled area)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is located within your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & 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 and available on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
By default, your site already comes with several 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, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily rearrange the layout of your site’s 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 click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the WP 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do several things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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 have done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site to 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 before publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add other features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, customer testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Most widgets offer various options 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with configurable options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful tips on how to get the most 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following topic-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 the WordPress platform please see our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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