There are many benefits to choosing WordPress for building and managing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can add functionality to your web site.
What Are Widgets? Understanding Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
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 write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- text ads
- customer testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart forms
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- 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 easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further fine-tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header section, in the footer area, even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widgetized section)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that the WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 area)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets section located inside your administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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. instantly become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them within your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily reorder the order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of your 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 image button (2) is placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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!)
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 prior to publishing any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how information displays 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 …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily change the order of elements in 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.
Reorganize 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your content 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 user comments, a section displaying clickable images, client testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, social media share buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WordPress CMS platform 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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