There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website without having coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you supercharge your website.
What Are Widgets? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets don’t require you to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your site.
(WP widgets help you manage technical 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 website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in certain areas of your site without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- site categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your site.
As you will learn in a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can be added.
Normally, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, the footer, sometimes even above or below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located within the WP admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window 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 sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 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 a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reorder the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
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
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, 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 have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do lots of modifications and adjustments 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, quotations or poll results, RSS feed content, video galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes 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 …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress 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 various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you 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 WP web content publishing platform please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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