There are many great things about using WordPress for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, why widgets are great applications for non-technical users and how widgets can supercharge your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize their site.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in parts of your website without touching any underlying 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- recent comments
- advertising
- client testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed information about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will learn shortly, WP themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your site’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find functions driven by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the header, in the footer, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only have a single widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that this WP theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 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)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area can be easily accessed inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays 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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and can be used.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget section …
If we change the order these widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of 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 banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth knowing about using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several edits 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your 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 before publishing it (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the layout in 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content excerpts, image galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize things. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding 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 cool 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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