There are many benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring any programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add functionality to your website.
WP Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
With widgets, users don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of their websites.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality to parts of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 many additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable images
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- subscription form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your site.
As you will learn in a moment, WP themes affect how widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can further enhance your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, in the footer area, sometimes even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widget section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use on your site.
Your Widgets panel also 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 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your 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 contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget section …
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 widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some other things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own 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 (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the sidebar by switching around 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 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS content, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many great 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 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 website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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