There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build and manage your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help to enhance the functionality of your site.
WordPress Widget: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website.
WordPress 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 the above sounds too technical. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WordPress widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize their websites.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality to certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS content
- opt-in subscription form
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide additional information about WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further extend your site’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find functions managed by widgets in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header section, in the footer area, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget area)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that the WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two 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 section)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within your WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If you could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your 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) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth knowing about using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your active 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside 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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, user testimonials or polls, content from RSS feeds, images, Facebook 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 give you little to no configuration options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure your site features. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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