There are loads of benefits to choosing WordPress for managing and growing your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains what WP widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help to supercharge your website or blog.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their sites.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code to areas of your WordPress 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 many functions you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS content
- newsletter subscription form
- video
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets work on your site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find functions controlled by widgets in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header section, in the footer, even below or above your content.
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 for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area 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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on 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 have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your dashboard 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 before publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the sidebar area 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with 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 your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived blog posts section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, customer testimonials or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, social media buttons, 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 customizable options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips for getting 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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