There are lots of great benefits to choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how WP widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add new functionality to your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in certain areas of your site 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 menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS content
- registration box
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and change the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can extend your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, you will find functions driven by widgets in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header area, the footer, even above or below the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that the WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WordPress theme …
(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 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 area)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within the WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are 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-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and can be used on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and 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 immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize your 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 and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your dashboard 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 shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS content excerpts, product 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure things. 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great tips on how to get the most out of WordPress using 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, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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