There are many great things about using WordPress to build and grow 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 requiring web coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you grow your website or blog.
WP Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your site without having to touch any web 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 functionality you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- post categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- post comments
- clickable ads
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in subscription form
- video
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the entire design of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that can improve your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, widget-powered functions can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only one widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets section located inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen 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 made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove 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, 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 or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in 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 graphic banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some more things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing your active 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widgets in the site’s sidebar area by switching 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to 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 the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS feed content, image galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have just 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 tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, 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 expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS software please see our related posts section.
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