There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for managing and growing your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can improve the functionality of your web site.
WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
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 have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets don’t require you to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code in parts of your site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display on widget-enabled 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 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 widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- advertisements
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes can affect where widgets work on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will help further extend your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the header, in the footer section, and even above or below the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have a single widget section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that the theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widgetized areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 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)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel 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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A 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 appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize 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 the live website.
You can do several edits in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar section 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to 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 the website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add other features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, user testimonials or survey results, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize these. This can include things like 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 …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
- WordPress Features Explained – What Are WP Plugins
- WordPress For Business – An Introduction To WP Themes
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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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