There are many great benefits to choosing WordPress to manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no code editing skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WP widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to expand the functionality of your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your site.
The WordPress software is written using a web 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 write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to certain parts of your website without having to touch any underlying 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 things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- index of pages
- site categories
- archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable text ads
- quotations
- surveys
- RSS content
- opt-in subscription form
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and change the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can further fine tune your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header section, footer, sometimes even below or above your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location 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 below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets section go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen 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 by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily reorder the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget area …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some other things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of things in preview mode, like adding, removing 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’ve 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 within your own WP 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how content displays in widgetized 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 elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the sidebar by switching 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using 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 web templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add useful features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, video galleries, social media share buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configuration options)
Most widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips for getting 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, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP software please see other posts we have published on this site.
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