There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software to build and manage your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring code editing skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why they are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can help you add functionality to your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give 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 remove content sections in certain parts 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 functions you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- user comments
- clickable ads
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, WP themes affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will further improve your website’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header area, the footer area, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only a single widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widget-enabled 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 section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside the WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, 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. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them from your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily rearrange the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and 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 your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around the currently added 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!)
Widget management is a great 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 change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar area 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a post archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertisements, user testimonials or survey results, RSS feed content, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, 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)
Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further configure them. 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 …
(Many widgets offer 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 easily added to your website or blog 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different kinds of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of cool 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress software please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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