There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without having any web coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to add functionality to your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize their websites.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code in certain areas of your website without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archived posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- recent comments from users
- advertising
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- registration box
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further extend your site’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.
Normally, widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the header, in the footer section, even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide a single widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
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. become immediately active on your site.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
By default, 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display 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 change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s 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) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
There are some more things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize your 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 to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around 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 have done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
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 your widget content will appear before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the site’s sidebar area 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor 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 website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)
Many widgets provide various 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 information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizable options!)
How To Use 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 useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many useful tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related 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 website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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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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