There are so many great benefits to using WordPress to manage and grow your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without requiring coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains how WP widgets work, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to grow your website.
What Is A WordPress Widget? Understanding Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or menu item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections in certain areas of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress theme on ”widgetized” 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- opt-in form
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn in a moment, themes affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can enhance your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Normally, widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, the footer section, even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have a single widgetized area)
Here 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 website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 section)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets section log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If we take a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me show you some other things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage your 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 things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your WP 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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widgets in the sidebar by switching around 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 with widgets can help 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived posts section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, customer testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, videos, Facebook feeds, 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 configuration options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing 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 web site 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 great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 topic-related posts useful:
- WordPress For Non-Technical Website Owners – What Is A WordPress Plugin
- WP For Newbies – An Introduction To Themes
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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