There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress to manage and grow your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no programming skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you supercharge your site.
WordPress Widgets – What Are They? A Basic Guide To Widgets For New Users
(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 script or menu item to your website.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any 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 WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- content categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- recent comments
- text ads
- quotations
- surveys & polls
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- videos
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide additional content about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, features controlled by widgets can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the header, in the footer, sometimes even above or below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only have one widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains various widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 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 WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within the WP dashboard and can be easily accessed from the admin menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window 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. instantly become active and can be used.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the 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 display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of your 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) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do lots of things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 to your site 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the sidebar 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to 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 the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a post archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or polls, RSS content excerpts, images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get the most 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you 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 for a business website please see our related posts section.
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