As we have explained in this post, there are lots of benefits in choosing WordPress for managing and growing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site, and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring web coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (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 theme you have installed) like:
- nested list of pages
- blog post categories
- post archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- subscriber form
- product images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy)
To learn more about what widgets are, how they work and why widgets make managing your site easier, see this article:
In this tutorial series you are going to learn how to use and configure various commonly-used WordPress widgets.
How To Use Widgets In WordPress
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 about using widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide areas in your theme’s layout where you can add widgets, such as the sidebar navigation area, header area, and footer sections. Depending on the theme, widgets can also be used below or above the content area …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
These widgetized layouts correspond to a feature inside your Widget screen called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
Widgets Screen
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays the “active” widgets …
(Widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like the sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and can be used for their purpose.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
Reorganize WordPress Widgets Using Drag-And-Drop
You can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove widgets by dragging and dropping items inside your Widgets section …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
You can also easily reconfigure the layout of your theme’s widgetized areas with drag & drop ease.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- ’Click to call’ buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin (i.e. a WordPress plugin with an accompanying widget) …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Inside the Widget area, you would see that the front end features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the back-end widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping some of the widgets around …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your sidebar.
Rearranging 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 image banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve visitor experience)
Removing Widgets From Your Sidebar Navigation Menu
Removing widgets from your WordPress sidebar is very easy.
For example, let’s delete the Search widget from the sidebar navigation section …
(Search widget)
To delete an active widget, you can either open up the widget and click the Delete link …
(How to delete a WordPress widget)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and drop it into the Inactive Widgets section …
(How to remove your widgets)
Repeat this process for any widgets you want removed from the sidebar navigation area. You can always reactivate a widget by dragging it 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Click on the little triangle in the corner of a widget to display the widget’s settings …
(Toggle to expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, click Delete to delete your 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)
Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme you choose, you can also preview any changes live 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 or blog.
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 your widget content will appear before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(preview widget changes in the Customize feature)
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 area in the backend.
You can do several edits and adjustments in preview mode (like inserting, removing and reorganizing your widgets), and see all changes in real time. If you like what you’ve done, click the “Save and Publish” button and the changes will instantly become visible on the blog’s frontend.
(Widget management – work in preview mode)
Once you have saved the changes, all changes made to widgets will be automatically updated.
Since the WordPress theme you choose can affect how elements display 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 saves you from having to keep two browsers open while you go through this tutorial (one to work in and one to check how the site is coming along).
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, let’s configure a number of commonly-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of section one of this tutorial series on how to use Widgets.
To continue, click this link:
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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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