There are lots of benefits to choosing WordPress to build and manage your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no code editing skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to grow your web site.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, 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 to a website, you need to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to areas of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 great things 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 WP widgets:
- pages on your site
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- clickable images
- client testimonials
- survey results
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide detailed content about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Normally, you will find widget-driven features in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section can be accessed inside the WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets you can 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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become available for use.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If you take a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area 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 by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of the 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 graphic button (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let me just show you some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, 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 have 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!)
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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widget elements in the sidebar menu 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to 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 the web templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, image galleries, social media share buttons, 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 customizing options)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure these. 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 give you customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following 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 the benefits of using the WordPress software please see our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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