There are so many benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building, managing and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout with no web coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your site.
How Do Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or menu item to your website or blog.
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 need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in areas of your website 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 many cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- image banners
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- member login section
- video
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further enhance your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, features managed by widgets can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, 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 WP 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 enabled area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area can be accessed inside the WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays 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 by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled 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 banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your 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 graphic button (2) is placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your 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 the live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WP 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 (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widgets in the site’s sidebar area 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor 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 website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or poll results, RSS feed items, videos, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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