There are loads of great benefits to choosing WordPress for building, managing and growing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without web coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WP widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your website.
How Do Widgets Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your site.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techie users.
With widgets, users don’t have to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their site.
(Widgets help you manage many 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 manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in parts of your WordPress site without touching 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 many functionality you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter subscription form
- video
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect how widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can extend your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can appear.
Usually, features powered by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header, in the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily reorder the layout of your 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 click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
If we could peek 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 their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in the 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 place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let me just show you some more things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and 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 lots of edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing your active 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar by switching 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 your site’s user 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 the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add things like a list of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS content, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Many widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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 boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of useful 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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