There are many benefits to choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site with no web programming skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can supercharge your web site.
WordPress Widgets – How Do They Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete sections of code to certain areas of your site without touching 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 things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- video
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, in the footer area, and even below or above your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 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)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be easily accessed inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
In addition, the Widgets screen 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 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them within your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- 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 we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the 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 image banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around the currently added 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your dashboard 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 errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized 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 widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived published posts section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configuration options)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to 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 WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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