Category: WordPress Customization

There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application to build, manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring web coding skills.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.

(WP widgets)

In this blog post you will learn how widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you grow your web site.

What Do WordPress Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program code.

Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.

With WordPress widgets, users don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of their sites.

(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)

Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:

• Easily insert, edit and delete blocks of code to parts of your WordPress site 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:

• nested page lists
• blog post categories
• archives
• menus
• links to external sites
• posts that you want to promote
• user comments
• clickable images
• quotations
• poll results
• content from RSS feeds
• registration box
• image galleries
• Facebook feeds
• add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
• administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and alter the design of your site.

As you will see in just a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will help further improve your site’s functionality.

Widgetized Themes

Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.

Normally, functions powered by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header section, in the footer area, even below your content area.

It all depends on the theme you have installed.

For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …

(Some themes only provide a single widget section)

Below is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …

As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.

In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …

(Many themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)

Here is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WP theme …

(Multiple widgets areas)

As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …

(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)

Where Do I Access My Widgets?

To access the Widgets area log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …

This brings up your Widgets section in your browser window …

(Widgets Area)

The Widgets panel displays a list of 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 and 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. immediately become activated for use.

In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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, Meta, etc. to your visitors …

(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …

(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)

Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …

(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)

With drag and drop you can easily reconfigure the order of your website’s widgetized sections.

For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:

1. A newsletter subscription form,
2. A contact support button, and
3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)

Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …

Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

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 first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)

Pretty simple stuff, huh?

Here are some more things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:

Widget Management – Previewing Widgets

Depending on 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 have done before committing your changes to your live website.

You can do a number of edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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!)

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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …

(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar area by switching around 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.

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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content, 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 an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …

(Some widgets provide users with little to no configuration options)

Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like 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 …

(Many widgets provide users with customization!)

How To Use WordPress Widgets

As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.

For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:

• WP Features Explained – What Is A WordPress Plugin
• WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WP Themes

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.

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