There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web programming skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WP widgets work, why they are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can help improve the functionality of your site.
WP Widgets: Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
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 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 script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
With WP widgets, you don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific 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 control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in certain areas of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 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 widgets:
- list of your web pages
- site categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- advertisements
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- subscriber form
- product catalog images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide detailed information about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, features powered by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, in the footer, even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes have only a single widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes a number of widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets section go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
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 made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag & drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widgetized areas.
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 on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 your live website.
You can do several things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 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 changes (and avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the layout in the site’s 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video thumbnails, Facebook 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 configuration options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 related posts useful:
- WordPress For Non-Technical Newbies – What Is A WP Plugin
- WP For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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