There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application to build and grow a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 many great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- clickable ad banners
- user testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed items
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the header, in the footer area, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WordPress 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within the WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use.
The Widgets panel also 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 Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them right inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily reconfigure the order and layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your 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 banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed, you can also customize and 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 your live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from 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 changes (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can completely rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the sidebar by switching around 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 elements with widgets can improve 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 site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add other features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or poll questions & results, content from RSS feeds, product images, Twitter 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web 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 tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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