There are so many great things about using WordPress for managing and growing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without web coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Owners
(WP 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 script or menu item to your website.
The WordPress software 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 learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to parts of your WordPress site without having to touch 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- post archives
- menus that display only the pages you choose
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- advertisements
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed items
- member login section
- videos
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, functions powered by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even above or below your content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this specific WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes various widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used 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 panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If we take a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Active 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 reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WP dashboard 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 (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the order of elements in the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, quotations or poll results, RSS content excerpts, video thumbnails, social media share buttons, 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 give you customization!)
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 some 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 improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
***
"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
***