There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site without programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to grow your web site.
What Are Widgets? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your site.
The WordPress software 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need 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.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to certain parts of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 many features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- archived blog posts
- menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the entire design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will extend your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widget-driven features can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header section, footer, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that the 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 above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WP theme …
(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 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)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(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 order of items in 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 section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me just show you some other things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing 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 to your site visitors.
(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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar 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 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, video galleries, Twitter feeds, 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 provide users with little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As you have 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 corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many cool tips on how to get 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website 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 our related posts section.
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