There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing application for building, managing and growing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout with no code editing skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn how WP widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help to expand the functionality of your website.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Beginners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets don’t require users to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to customize their site.
(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in parts of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display on ”widgetized” areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the many cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of your web pages
- blog categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- image banners
- customer testimonials
- poll results
- RSS feed items
- registration box
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and alter the design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your web site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, the footer section, and even below or above the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only one widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within the WP admin area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the layout of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done in real time. If you like what you have 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 own 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 (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the layout in the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s 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 the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising, quotations or polls, RSS content, image galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like 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. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many useful tips on how to get the most 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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