There are lots of great benefits to choosing WordPress for building and growing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, 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.
(WP widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website.
What Are Widgets? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. 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 code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to areas of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display 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 area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- site categories
- archives
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- recent comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- registration box
- images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the entire look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further extend your site’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added.
Typically, you will find functions driven by widgets in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, in the footer, sometimes even below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, 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 WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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 panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can 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 display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing the currently added 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WordPress 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the layout in 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout using 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 site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, image galleries, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 customization)
Many widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize them. This includes 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 provide users with configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP web site 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips for getting the most benefit 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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