There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without having any code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to grow your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in areas of your website without touching 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 many functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- image banners
- client testimonials
- survey results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in form
- videos
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed information about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website.
As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your site’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, you will find functions driven by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header area, footer, sometimes even below or above the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within the WP admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and available on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove 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 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, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
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 site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let’s go over some more things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, 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 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!)
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 it (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or poll results, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Most widgets offer additional settings 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following 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 the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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