There are so many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software for building, managing and growing a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how WordPress widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to expand the functionality of your site.
WP Widget: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your website.
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 have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets don’t require you to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your website.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove blocks of code in certain areas of your website without having to touch 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- image banners
- testimonials
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- product images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new functionality to WordPress and alter the design of your site.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find widget-driven features in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, the footer, sometimes even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only have one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that the theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located within the WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your site’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 subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
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 site’s active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth knowing about using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to 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 your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 to 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user 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 your web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add things like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or poll results, content from RSS feeds, images, Facebook feeds, 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 give you little to no customization)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure your site features. This can include things like 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 …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful tips for getting 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 new at WordPress, 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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