There are loads of great things about using WordPress to build and manage a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your website without having programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how WP widgets work, what they do and how widgets can help you to add functionality to your site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WP 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 feature, or a text box or item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their site.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need 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 simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in areas of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- video
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will see in just a moment, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further improve your website’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Typically, features controlled by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the header area, footer, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget-ready area)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the admin menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 Search, Recent Comments, Meta, 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 display in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all inside your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example 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 the site’s active widget bar …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of your 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 place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some more things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around 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 within your WP 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized 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 layout with widgets to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls, RSS content, images, Twitter 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 customization)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website 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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