There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build, manage and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what WP widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your website.
What Are Widgets? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- text ads
- quotations
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- video galleries
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the header, footer, even below the content.
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 features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section can be easily accessed inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you have available.
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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active.
Your Widgets screen 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 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to site 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, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them from your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
With drag & drop you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar 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 your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your site’s 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) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some more useful things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, 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 on your site to 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorganize how content is displayed 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 …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or poll questions & results, content from RSS feeds, images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 various settings that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of useful 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 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 grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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