There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site without coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your web site.
What Are Widgets? Understanding WordPress Widgets For New Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your WP site.
WordPress 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 need to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features in parts of your WordPress site without touching any web 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 great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- comments
- clickable images
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter registration form
- videos
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide additional information about WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn in a moment, WP themes affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, widget-powered functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header area, in the footer, even below the content.
It all depends on the 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 themes provide only a single widget section)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that the theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress theme …
(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section 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 made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Use drag & drop to easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
Let’s now change these widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are a few other things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your WordPress 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widget elements in the sidebar menu 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 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived blog posts section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising, client testimonials or polls, content from RSS feeds, product images, social media buttons, 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 offer a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. 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 give you configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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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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