There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no programming skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can grow your website or blog.
How Do Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website or blog.
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 know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to touch 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 plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to parts of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- post categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS content
- subscription form
- video thumbnails
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- 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 can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, footer, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have a single widgetized section)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that the theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(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 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)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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. automatically become activated for use 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 actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them from your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A 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 on your site appear)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the 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 reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are some other things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and 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 many things in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing 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 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how content displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by 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 the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, user testimonials or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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