There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool to build and manage a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your site.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application 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 need to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- comments
- advertisements
- customer testimonials
- survey results
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide additional information about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and change the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can improve your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in your site’s header, in the footer, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes various widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located within your WP dashboard and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
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 made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the order 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 banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of the 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 opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed on your site, 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do a number of edits in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around 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 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the order of elements in the site’s sidebar menu by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived blog post entries section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, client testimonials or poll results, RSS content excerpts, product catalog images, social media sharing 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 customizable options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog 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 different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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