There are so many great benefits to using WordPress to build and manage your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn what WordPress widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to expand the functionality of your website or blog.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize their site.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress theme on widget-enabled areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the features you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- post categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- client testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- subscriber form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website.
As you will learn in a moment, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further improve your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Usually, widget-driven functions can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header, in the footer area, and even above or below your content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have one widgetized section)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside your WP dashboard and can easily be accessed from the administration menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets (e.g. widgets for displaying your pages, links, posts, post categories, adding text, adding RSS feeds, adding tags, adding a search box, etc …) and active widgets.
These widgets are available in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them right inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me show you some other things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you’ve done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your WordPress 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the sidebar menu by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, customer testimonials or poll questions & results, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress with widgets:
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 1
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 2
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 3
- How To Use And Configure WordPress Widgets – Part 4
Related Posts
If you are new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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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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