As discussed in this post, there are loads of benefits in choosing WordPress for building and managing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality, and reconfigure the layout of your site without code editing skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage content on your website’s sidebar area (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) 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:
- index of pages
- categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- advertising
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- customers login section
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier)
To learn more about what WP widgets are, how widgets work and why widgets make managing your site easier, see this article:
In this tutorial series we show you how to use and configure a number of commonly-used widgets in WordPress.
Using WordPress Widgets
Widgets – The Basics
Before we begin configuring and using widgets, let’s review 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 areas in your theme’s layout where you can use widgets, such as the sidebar, header area, and the footer area. Depending on your theme, widgets can sometimes also show up in the content area …
(Many themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
These widget-ready areas correspond to a feature inside the Widget management screen called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
The Widgets Panel
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Widgets can be activated or deactivated with drag & drop ease)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available for use.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
Rearrange Widgets With Drag And Drop
You can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove things using widgets using drag and drop inside your Widgets section …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
You can also easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widgetized areas using drag-and-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 newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A ‘click to call’ section from a widgetized WordPress plugin (i.e. a WordPress plugin with an accompanying widget) …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
If we look inside this site’s Widget area, you will see that these features correspond to the order of widgets inside the active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help to 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 ‘contact us’ banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
Deleting Widgets From The Sidebar Section
Removing widgets from your sidebar is really easy.
For example, let’s show you how to delete the Search widget from the sidebar …
(Search widget)
To delete an active widget, you can either open up the widget and click the Delete link …
(How to delete a widget)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and drop it into the Inactive Widgets area …
(Removing your WordPress widget)
Repeat this process for all widgets you want removed from your sidebar navigation section. You can always reinstate widgets by moving them back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize 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.
Clicking on the little triangle in the corner of a widget expands the item and displays the settings for that widget …
(Toggle to expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, click Delete to 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 something like an optional title …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Theme Customizer
Depending upon which theme you choose, you can also preview any changes live without actually making changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like your customizations before committing anything to your website or blog.
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 (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area.
(preview widget changes in the Customize section)
When viewing your site on the front-end just calick the Customize link in the toolbar …
(Toolbar Customize Link)
This brings you to the Customizer feature in the back-end.
You can do many edits 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 your changes will instantly become available on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode)
After your changes have been saved, WordPress will automatically update the widget settings and display your latest configuration to your site visitors.
Since WordPress Themes can display elements differently on your site, we recommend that you install the theme first before configuring widgets on your sidebar.
Also, remember to use the WordPress Customizer to preview your changes. This will save 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 configure various commonly-used widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of part 1 of this series of tutorials about how to use WordPress widgets.
Click on this link to continue reading:
- How To Add And Configure WordPress Widgets On The WordPress Blog Sidebar Navigation Section – Part 2
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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