There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing application to build and grow your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website or blog.
What Is A WordPress Widget? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- blog post categories
- archived content posts
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- video
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- 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 plugins and themes can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can be added.
Typically, widget-driven functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, the footer, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see that the WP theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, 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 WordPress theme shown below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the order of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let me show you some more things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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.
(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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the order of elements in the site’s sidebar section 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 elements using widgets can 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or poll results, RSS feed content, images, Facebook 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 provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many 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 added to your website 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many cool tips for getting 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 posts useful:
- WordPress Features Explained – What Is A WordPress Plugin
- WP For Business – An Overview Of WP Themes
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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