There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without having any coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to grow your site.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions in certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any web 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- content categories
- archived content posts
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- advertisements
- user testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter registration form
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WordPress themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that will enhance your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Normally, you will find features managed by widgets in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header area, in the footer area, and even below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget enabled area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets area whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout of your website’s 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 contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we took a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some more things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual WordPress 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 have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 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 errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly 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-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived blog post entries section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, product catalog images, social media sharing buttons, 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)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For 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 boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great 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 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 get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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