As we discuss in this article, there are so many great benefits in choosing the WordPress web publishing software for building and growing your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality, and reconfigure the site’s layout with no coding skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar navigation menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your 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 page lists
- blog categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- advertisements
- user testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- newsletter subscription form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets 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 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 configuring and using widgets, it helps to first go over some of the basic concepts about how to use widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widget-Ready Layouts
Many WordPress themes support widgets and provide built-in widget-ready sections in your theme’s layout where widgets can be used, such as the sidebar, header area, and the footer area. Depending on what theme you are using, widgets can sometimes also appear below or above the content area …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
These widget-ready areas correspond to a feature inside your Widget management panel called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
Widgets Panel
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays the “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like the sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available for use.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
Reorganize Widgets With Drag-And-Drop
You can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete widgets using simple drag & drop inside your Widgets area …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
You can also easily reconfigure your theme’s layout by dragging and dropping widgets.
For example, in the image below, the widgets have already been configured to display things like:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- ’Click to call’ feature from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a plugin that adds an accompanying widget to your site) …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
Looking inside the Widget area, you would see that the front-end features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the back-end widget area …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in the widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar navigation area …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can improve visitor experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar, and the ‘contact us’ banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
Removing Widgets From The WordPress Sidebar Area
Deleting widgets from the sidebar navigation menu is very easy.
For example, let’s show you how to delete the Search widget from your sidebar menu …
(WordPress Search widget)
To delete a widget from an active Widget area, either expand the widget settings and click the Delete link …
(How to delete widgets)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets area and drop it into the Inactive Widgets area …
(Removing WordPress widgets)
Repeat this process for all widgets you want removed from your sidebar navigation menu. You can always reinstate a widget by dragging it back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets can be further customized. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered 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 expands the item and displays the widget’s settings …
(Toggles 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 something like an optional title …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Widget Previews
Depending upon which WP theme you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage widgets without actually making changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you are happy with what you have done before making any permanent changes to your website.
The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 before publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(Edit widgets in the Customize feature)
If you need to make changes to your site while viewing the frontend, just click on the Customize link …
(Customize your site quickly)
This will bring you to the Customizer section in the back-end.
You can do many edits and adjustments to the widgets in preview mode (like inserting, removing and moving widgets around), and see all changes in real time. If you like the results, click the “Save and Publish” button and your changes will instantly become visible to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode)
Once you have saved your changes, your site will automatically update the widget settings and display your new configuration to your site visitors.
Because the WordPress theme you choose affect how elements display on your site, we recommend that you install the theme first before configuring widgets on the sidebar.
Also, remember to use the Customizer feature to preview your changes. This saves you from having to keep two browsers open while you complete this tutorial.
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, the next step is to learn how to start configuring various commonly-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of section one of this series of tutorials on using Widgets.
Click here to continue:
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