As we’ve explained in this post, there are many great things about choosing WordPress for building and managing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website, and reconfigure the layout of your website without web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage content in your website’s sidebar (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
Once you know how to use widgets, you can easily add things to your site like:
- list of your web pages
- site categories
- post archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- advertising
- customer testimonials
- survey results
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy)
To learn more about what widgets are, how they work and why widgets make managing your site easier, go here:
In this tutorial series you will learn how to use and configure a number of frequently-used WordPress widgets.
How To Use Widgets In WordPress
The Basics
Before configuring and using widgets, it helps to first explain some of the basic concepts of how to use widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide built-in areas in the theme’s layout where you can use widgets, such as the sidebar menu, header area, and the footer area. Depending on what theme you are using, widgets can sometimes also display in the content area …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget areas)
These widgetized sections correspond to a feature inside the Widget administration screen called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
Widgets Screen
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
Reorganize WordPress Widgets With Drag And Drop
You can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete widgets by dragging and dropping items from your Widgets area …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
You can also easily rearrange the order of your website’s widgetized sections using drag-and-drop.
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 click for support button, and
- ’Click to call’ buttons from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a WordPress plugin with an accompanying widget) …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If you take a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you will see that these features correspond to the order of widgets inside the active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping some of these widgets around …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in the widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar navigation area …
This instantly changes the layout of the site’s sidebar.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help improve user experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar area, and the support banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
Removing Widgets From Your WordPress Sidebar
Deleting widgets from the sidebar menu is very easy.
For example, let’s delete the Search widget from the sidebar …
(Search widget)
To remove a widget from an active Widget area, you can either open up the widget settings and click the Delete link …
(How to delete your widget)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and drop it into the Inactive Widgets section …
(Remove a WordPress widget)
Repeat this process for any widgets you want to remove from your sidebar. You can always reinstate widgets by dragging them back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets can be customized further. 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Click on the little triangle in the corner of a widget to expand the item …
(Toggling expands/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, remove the widget from the “Active Widgets” section, close the widget, or click on the triangle to collapse the widget settings …
(Widget settings)
Some widgets may require or offer no customization, or they may only allow you to add an optional title …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizable options)
Preview Widgets
Depending upon which theme you have installed, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like the customized edits before committing anything to your website.
Widget management is a great feature of WordPress. You can work in preview mode inside the WordPress Theme Customizer screen (Appearance > Customize) and see how the widget content will appear prior to publishing it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(Edit widgets in the Customize feature)
If you need to make changes to the site while viewing the front-end, just click on the Customize link …
(Toolbar Customize Link)
This brings you to the Customizer screen in the back-end.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode (like inserting, removing and reorganizing your widgets), and everything is done in real time. If you like what you’ve done, click the “Save and Publish” button and the changes will be instantly updated and reflected on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode)
After your changes have been saved, all changes made to widgets will be automatically updated.
Since the theme you choose tend to affect how elements display on your site, we recommend installing your theme first before configuring widgets on your sidebar.
Also, remember to use the WordPress Customizer to preview your changes. This saves you from having to keep two browsers open while you work through this tutorial (one to work in and one to see your site the way your visitors will see it).
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, it’s time to learn how to start configuring a number of frequently-used WordPress sidebar widgets.
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This is the end of section one of this tutorial series.
Click here to read the rest of this tutorial series:
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