There are loads of great things about choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site with no coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to areas of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- advertising
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- subscription form
- images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can be added.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in your site’s header section, in the footer, and even below or above the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found inside your WordPress dashboard and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active.
Your Widgets panel 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.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily reorder the order of your widgetized sections.
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 contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we change the above 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 widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the site’s 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) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage your 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 your live website.
You can do lots of modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar by switching 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 help to improve 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 your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or survey results, content from RSS feeds, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customization)
Most widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
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 corresponding 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 various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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