There are lots of great benefits to using WordPress to build and grow a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without having code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your site.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
With WP widgets, you don’t have to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your site.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code to certain areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 many great things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- post archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- image banners
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart information
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your website or blog’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header area, in the footer section, and even below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only have a single widget section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress administration area and can be accessed from the admin menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange 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:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these 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 widgets 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 feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are a few other things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WordPress 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 before publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add other features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, image galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 provide users with customization!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many great tips on how to get the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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