There are loads of great things about using WordPress to build, manage and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains how WP widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help expand the functionality of your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical 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 allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in certain parts of your website without touching any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- videos
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide additional content about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, WP themes affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Normally, widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header section, in the footer, even below your content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide one widget area)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(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 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 screen is located within the WordPress admin area and can be accessed from the admin menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays 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 activated or deactivated 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. instantly become activated for use.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize 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 several edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around 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 inside your own WordPress 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 (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar section 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived blog posts section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or polls, RSS content, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customizing options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize these. 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 configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have 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 the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please see other posts we have published on this site.
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