There are lots of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without having any programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains how WP widgets work, what they do and how widgets can be used to expand the functionality of your website or blog.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
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 learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets don’t require you to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete blocks of code to parts of your site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- site categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- post comments
- text ads
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- videos
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new functionality to WordPress and change the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will see in a moment, themes can affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Typically, functions controlled by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header area, the footer area, and even above or below your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes have only one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above 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 a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your WP administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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. automatically become activated for use.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them from your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
If we could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also customize 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 the live website.
You can do a number of edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your active 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!)
Widget management 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 you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging 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 reorganized the sidebar by switching 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or poll results, content from RSS feeds, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use WP 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 related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, 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 build a better online. To learn more about using the WP content publishing platform 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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