There are so many benefits to choosing WordPress to manage and grow a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no web coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your website.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techie users.
With widgets, you don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features in certain parts of your WordPress site without touching 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 great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- post comments
- advertising banners
- client testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can improve your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, in the footer, and even below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WP admin area and can be accessed from the administration menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
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 made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widgetized 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 subscription form,
- A click for 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 appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of 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 graphic banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let me show you some more things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
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 any changes (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar section 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help 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 the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, customer testimonials or surveys & polls, content from RSS feeds, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customization)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customization!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have 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 different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many 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:
Hopefully, this information 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 for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
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