There are loads of great benefits to choosing WordPress to build and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without requiring web coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you add functionality to your website or blog.
What Are WordPress Widgets? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or item to your website.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code in certain parts of your website without having to touch any 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- content categories
- archive
- menus that display only the pages you choose
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- advertisements
- client testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- subscriber form
- image galleries
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide additional information about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will further enhance your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Usually, widget-driven functions can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, the footer section, sometimes even below your content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget-ready section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WP theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section can be easily accessed inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & 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 active and available.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use 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 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 several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website, you will see 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 & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
If you were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and 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 layout of your 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 banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WP 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do several things in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WP dashboard 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 before publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 most 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 a customers login section, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls, RSS feed items, video galleries, social media share buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 customization)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress site 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many great 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress 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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