There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build and manage your business online. 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 without having web programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains what WP widgets are, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your website.
WordPress Widgets: Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or menu item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
Widgets don’t require you to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to enhance your website.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your website without touching any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in subscription form
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, widget-driven functions can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header, in the footer, even below or above your content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only a single widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 area)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays 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 made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
In addition, your 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 settings.
By default, 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reorder the order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
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 change the order these widgets in the 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 reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 many things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your WP dashboard 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the site’s sidebar 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor 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 reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, user testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS content, product catalog images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customization!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different 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 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 get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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