There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for managing and growing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how WP widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? Understanding Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying 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 functions you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- site categories
- archive
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- advertisements
- customer testimonials
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter registration form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional content about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can further fine tune your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the header, in the footer, sometimes even below or above the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only one widget-ready section)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this specific theme only contains 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 WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two 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)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of 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 & 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. instantly become active and available.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few more useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 many modifications 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 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WP dashboard 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 prior to publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar section 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can 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 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 subscription forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, user testimonials or surveys, RSS content, video thumbnails, 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configuration options)
Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your 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 great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great tips on how to get the most benefit 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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