There are so many benefits to using WordPress to build and manage a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add new functionality to your site.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list 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 have to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions to parts of your website without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 functions you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of your web pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- post comments
- text ads
- user testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- registration box
- product images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- 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 functionality to WordPress and even change the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further fine-tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can display.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even above or below your 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 area …
(Some themes only have a single widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, 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 WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget-enabled sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 3 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 screen is found inside the WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of 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 activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and can be used on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site 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 section when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
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 were arranged in their active widget section …
If we change the above widgets in the Active 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 …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in 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 image banner (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few other things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all 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 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you easily rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-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 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 widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements using 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 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 newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or polls, RSS content, images, 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 give you little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many great tips for getting 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 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 using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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