There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your site with no coding skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help you to supercharge your site.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t have to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to enhance their websites.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing 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 sections of code 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 functionality you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- archive
- menus that display only the pages you choose
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- clickable ads
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- newsletter subscription form
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide additional content about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further extend your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header section, in the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that the theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widgetized sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your WP administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you 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. become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and 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 …
This instantly changes the order of items in the 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 graphic button (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some more useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do lots of edits 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 everything is 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the sidebar section by switching 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements 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 a newsletter registration form, or just add features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived published posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS feed content, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 detailed 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 benefit 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information 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 the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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