There are loads of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without having web coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what WP widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can expand the functionality of your website.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application 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 program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- blog categories
- archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- comments
- image banners
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your site.
As you will see in a moment, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can display.
Normally, features powered by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, the footer area, and even below the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide a single widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen 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-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active.
In addition, your Widgets panel 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of your 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 graphic banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing 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 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add useful features like a list of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archived content posts section, menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising banners, client testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content, video thumbnails, 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 give you little to no customization)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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