There are many great things about using WordPress for building and managing your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete sections of code in areas of your site 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of your web pages
- categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- customers login section
- images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your site’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find widget-powered features in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, footer, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only a single widget section)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside the WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
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. automatically become 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 to actively display on your site. 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily rearrange the layout and order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If you took a look inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the site’s 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 graphic button (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me just show you some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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’ve 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, 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 redesigned the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or poll results, RSS content, image galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize 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 configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP web site 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 great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about 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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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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