There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build, manage and grow your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without having any programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains how WordPress widgets work, what they do and how widgets can help improve the functionality of your web site.
WordPress Widgets – How Do They Work? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to enhance your website.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions in certain parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- site categories
- post archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- video thumbnails
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide detailed information about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole design of your site.
As you will see in a moment, themes affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can improve your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Typically, you will find features managed by widgets in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header area, in the footer, and even below the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area 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 themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific 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 area)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside your WP dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use 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 activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside the example 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 active widget bar …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
There are some more things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you’ve 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 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 (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived blog posts section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, quotations or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, product images, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Most widgets offer various options that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress web 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 site, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post 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 the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.
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