There are many benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no coding skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you grow your website.
Widgets – What Do They Do? Understanding Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or menu item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features in parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- post archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- recent comments from users
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in subscription form
- images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further extend your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, widget-driven functions can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header area, in the footer area, even above or below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located within the WP administration area and can easily be accessed from the admin menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area 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 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 can be used.
The 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 retain their 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the 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 display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If you took a look inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some other things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed, 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 these changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing 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 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 any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the sidebar by switching 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve user 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, video galleries, Facebook feeds, 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 provide users with little to no customizable options)
Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you 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 for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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