There are many great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, what they do and how widgets can supercharge your web site.
WordPress Widgets – How Do They Work? Understanding Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of their sites.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of pages
- blog categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable ad banners
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- content from RSS feeds
- subscription form
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will help further extend your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can show.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header, the footer area, sometimes 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 provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes have only a single widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that the WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside the WordPress admin area and can be easily accessed from the WP administration menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
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 by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WP 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 admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we take a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget section …
If we change the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized 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 first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) is found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage 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 several things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, 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’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!)
Widget management is a valuable 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 mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the site’s sidebar area 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising, user testimonials or survey results, RSS feed content, images, Twitter 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 configurable options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have 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 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips on how to get 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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