There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build, manage 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 your site’s layout without having coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website or blog.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For New Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your site.
The WordPress application 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 need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techie users.
With WP widgets, you don’t have to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to customize your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to parts of your website without touching any code, and
- Rearrange 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 functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- website page list
- blog categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- recent comments
- advertising banners
- customer testimonials
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- video
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external 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 easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will enhance your site’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, footer, and even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only have one widget-ready area)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed from the admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used 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 made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily reorder the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly 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 reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let me just show you some other useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual 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 your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your active 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 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how content displays in widgetized 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 using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching 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.
Reorganize 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 the website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or surveys & polls, content from RSS feeds, product images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 provide additional options that allow you to further customize things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your 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 customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress site 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great tips for getting the most benefit 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 web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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