There are loads of benefits to choosing WordPress for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website without having programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help add functionality to your site.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Introduction To Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress application 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 need to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techies.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your site.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in certain areas of your website without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- user comments
- text ads
- client testimonials
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- 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 add loads of new features to WordPress and change the entire design of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website’s features.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, in the footer area, even above or below the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(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 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)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WP admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets screen 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.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them within your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
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 button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag & 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 site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 many things in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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 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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how information displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, 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 quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user 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 reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to 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 post categories, an archived posts section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or poll results, RSS content, images, Twitter feeds, 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 give you little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, 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 or blog 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 kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post 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 using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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