There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout with no programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help you supercharge your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
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 have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- post comments
- clickable ads
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- opt-in form
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the entire design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will improve your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header area, in the footer area, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your WP administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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 available for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel 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.
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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them right inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reorder 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 display:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 any changes (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar menu by switching around 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout with 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys, RSS content, product images, social media share 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 provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site 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 configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site 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 boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit out of WordPress using 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you 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 the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.
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