There are loads of benefits to using WordPress to build, manage and grow your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add new functionality to your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
WordPress 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 learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their websites.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove sections of code in certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- blog post categories
- post archives
- menus that display only the pages you choose
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- image banners
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content
- opt-in subscription form
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets display on your site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your website’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, you will find features managed by widgets in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header area, in the footer, sometimes even below or above the content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only one widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that this particular theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains a number of widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is found inside your WP admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that are currently available for use 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 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. immediately become active and can be used on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of the site’s 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 banner (2) is found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some more things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s 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 layout using 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, customer testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 offer various options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress web 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 tutorials showing you how to use different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you 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 using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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