As we’ve explained in this post, there are loads of great things about choosing WordPress to build and manage your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site, and rearrange the site’s layout without code editing skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on the site) using widgets.
Once you know how to use widgets, you can easily add things to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) like:
- nested list of pages
- blog categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable ads
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- subscription form
- product images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier)
To learn more about what WP widgets are, how widgets work and how using widgets can help you expand the functionality of your website, see this article:
In this tutorial you are going to learn how to use and configure various frequently-used widgets in WordPress.
Using Widgets
The Basics
Before we explain how to configure widgets, let’s make sure that you understand some of the basic concepts about using widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide built-in widgetized sections in your theme’s layout where widgets can be used, such as the sidebar navigation section, header area, and footer. Depending on what theme you are using, widgets can also be found inside the content area …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-enabled areas)
These widget-ready sections correspond to a feature inside your Widget panel called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
Widgets Panel
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays the “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets with drag & drop ease)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like the sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and can be used to perform their function on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
Reorganize Widgets Using Drag & Drop
You can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete widgets using simple drag and drop inside your Widgets section …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
You can also easily reorder your theme’s layout using drag & drop.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display things like:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A ‘click to call’ function from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a WordPress plugin that adds an accompanying widget to your site) …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside the Widget area, you would see that the front end features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the backend widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping items …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help improve visitor experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar, and the support section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
Deleting Widgets From Your Sidebar Section
Removing widgets from the sidebar is really 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 expand the widget and click the Delete link …
(Delete WordPress widgets)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and drop it into the Inactive Widgets section …
(How to remove your widget)
Repeat this process for all widgets you want to remove from the sidebar. You can always restore widgets by moving them back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets can be further customized. This can include things like hiding information from users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Clicking on the little triangle in the corner of a widget toggles between expanding and collapsing the item and displays the widget’s settings …
(Toggle to expand/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 give you little to no customization)
Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the theme you use, you can also preview any changes live without making actual changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like your customizations before committing anything live to your website or blog.
The ability to manage widgets from the 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 the widget content will appear prior to publishing changes (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area.
(Edit widgets in the Customize feature)
When viewing your site on the front-end just calick the Customize link in the toolbar …
(Customize link in the toolbar)
This brings you to the Customizer section in the backend.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode (like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your widgets), and this will all be done in real time. If you are happy with the results, click the “Save and Publish” button and the changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – configure widgets on the fly!)
Once your changes are saved, the new updates will automatically be added to your site.
Since the WordPress theme you choose tend to affect how elements display on your site, we recommend installing your theme first before configuring widgets.
Also, remember to use the Customizer feature to preview all changes. This saves you from having to keep two browsers open while you work through this tutorial.
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, it’s time to learn how to begin configuring various commonly-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of part 1 of this tutorial series about how to use WordPress widgets.
To keep reading, click this link:
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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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