There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage a website. 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 without requiring programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, 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 to enhance the functionality of your web site.
What Do Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform 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 that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections to areas of your website without having to touch any 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- pages on your website
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- image banners
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart forms
- images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website.
As you will learn in a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Typically, features managed by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header, in the footer area, and even above or below your content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that this particular theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area 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 includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that you currently have 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 made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, 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 or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all from your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we take a look inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do a number of things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own dashboard 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the order of elements in the site’s sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout with 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video thumbnails, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Most widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configuration options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your site 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 or blog, plus lots of cool tips for getting the most 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 new at WordPress, 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 build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit 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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