There are lots of great things about using WordPress for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you supercharge your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu 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 need to know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete blocks of code in parts of your website without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress theme 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 WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- archive
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- advertisements
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- newsletter subscription form
- images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the whole design of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further fine tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, widget-driven features can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header area, footer, and even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP 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 Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WP admin area and can be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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 Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all right inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the 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 section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some more things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on 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 have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several things in preview mode, like adding, removing 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 have 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 own dashboard 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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the sidebar area 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 elements using widgets to 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, user testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure things. 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your site 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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