There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without having any coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WP widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to grow your website.
How Do Widgets Work? Understanding Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets eliminate the need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to customize their websites.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections to parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- site pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- customers login section
- video galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, functions controlled by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header area, the footer area, sometimes even below or above the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes have only one widget-ready area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where 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 two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are 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 by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
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 their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized 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 function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize your 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 the live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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!)
Widget management is a valuable 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 widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the layout in the sidebar by switching around 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add useful features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or surveys & polls, content from RSS feeds, image galleries, social media share buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customization)
Many 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 site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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, plus lots of cool 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, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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