There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without code editing skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can supercharge your site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a web 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 program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features in certain areas of your site without touching any 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 many features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of pages
- post categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart forms
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further improve your site’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header section, the footer area, even below the content.
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 displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 area)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your WP dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove 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, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them inside your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the order and layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If you take a look inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget area …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar 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 …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some other things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around 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’ve 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 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 any changes (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the sidebar 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived blog post entries section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, 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 customizing options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
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 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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