There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool to build and grow your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your website without having programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website.
What Do Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 many functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- image banners
- customer testimonials
- poll results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and even change the design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect how widgets work on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can appear.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even below or above your content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widget area)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place 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 various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
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-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout 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 display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
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 have been arranged in their active widget area …
If we change the order the above 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 …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few other useful things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do many things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around 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 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 it (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar menu 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 elements with 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add features like a list of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising, client testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, 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 an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure things. 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 …
(Many widgets offer customizable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get the most out of WordPress with 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about 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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