There are many great benefits to choosing WordPress to build and grow a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without having any web programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains how WP widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to add functionality to your web site.
WordPress Widget: An Overview Of Widgets For Beginners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techie users.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of their sites.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete sections of code in parts of your website without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- clickable text ads
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart information
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other 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 add new functionality to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will see shortly, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can show up in.
Typically, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the header, the footer, even below the 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 adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately 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 to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their 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, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new 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 area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do many things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 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 any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve user 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add other features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived blog posts section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve 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 WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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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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