As we explain in this article, one of the many benefits of choosing the WordPress web publishing application for building and growing your web site is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality, or reorganize your site’s layout with no code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, 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 WordPress theme you have installed) like:
- list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- comments
- advertising
- customer testimonials
- survey results
- content from RSS feeds
- subscription form
- video
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy)
To learn more about what widgets are, how widgets work and why they make managing your site easier, see this article:
In this tutorial series you will learn how to use and configure various frequently-used widgets in WordPress.
How To Use WordPress Widgets
What You Need To Know First
Before we show you how to configure widgets, let’s first make sure that you understand some of the basics of using widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widget-Ready Areas
Many WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in your theme’s layout where you can add widgets, such as the sidebar area, header area, and the footer area. Depending on your theme, widgets can sometimes also be added inside the content area …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
These widget-ready sections correspond to a feature inside the Widget management area called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
Your Widgets Screen
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays all “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like the sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
Reorganize Widgets With Drag & Drop
You can easily add new functionality to your site, or activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete things using widgets just by dragging and dropping items inside your Widgets area …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
You can also easily reconfigure your theme’s layout using drag & drop.
For example, in the image below, the widgets have already been configured to display the following to visitors:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- ’Click to call’ buttons from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a WordPress plugin that adds an accompanying widget to your site) …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we take a look inside this site’s Widget area, you will see that these features correspond to the order of widgets inside the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order of the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of the sidebar.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar, and the support section (2) is placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
Removing Widgets From Your WordPress Blog Sidebar Section
Deleting widgets from your WordPress sidebar is really easy.
For example, let’s show you how to remove the Search widget from your sidebar …
(Search widget)
To delete an active widget, you can either open up the widget settings and click the Delete link …
(Deleting your WordPress widget)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and into the Inactive Widgets area …
(Remove your widget)
Repeat this process for any widgets you want removed from the sidebar. You can always reinstate a widget by dragging it back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure things. This can include things like hiding information from users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, 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 …
(Toggles expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, click Delete to remove your widget from the “Active Widgets” section, close the widget, or click on the triangle to collapse the widget …
(Widget settings)
Some widgets may require or offer no customization, or they may only allow you to add something like an optional title …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)
Preview Your Widgets
Depending upon which theme you are using, you’re also able to preview any changes live without actually making changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like the customized edits before committing anything to your website or blog.
The ability to manage widgets from your own WP 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(preview widget changes live in the Customize feature)
If you need to make changes to your site while viewing the frontend, just click on the Customize link …
(Toolbar Customize Link)
This will bring you to the Customizer screen in the back-end.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode (like adding, removing and reorganizing your widgets), and see all changes in real time. If you are happy with the results, click the “Save and Publish” button and your changes will instantly become visible on the site’s frontend.
(Widget management – configure widgets on the fly!)
After saving your changes, all changes made to widgets will be automatically updated.
Because WordPress Themes can display elements differently 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 a number of commonly-used widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of section 1 of this tutorial series.
To continue, click here:
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