There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build, manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site without having any coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help to improve the functionality of your website.
What Are Widgets? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing 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 delete features to parts of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- index of pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- post comments
- text ads
- client testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content
- subscription form
- video galleries
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will see in a moment, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can display.
Usually, you will find functions controlled by widgets in the sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the header section, the footer area, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have one widget-ready section)
Below is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that this particular WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen 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 available for use on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all from your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reconfigure the layout of your website’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 opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If you took a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes 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 section (2) is now placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few other things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage 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 lots of edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing the currently added 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own dashboard 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar section 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add other features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or survey results, content from RSS feeds, product 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 an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
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 website 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips on how to get the most 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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