There are so many great things about using the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, 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 make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance their websites.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove features in certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- website page list
- categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- recent comments
- image banners
- quotations
- polls
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart forms
- video
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will extend your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can appear.
Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, footer, even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 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 area)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their 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 Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them from your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we could peek 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 bar …
Let’s now change these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s 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) is now located above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage your 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 a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your current 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own 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 before publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your 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 quickly rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the site’s sidebar section 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 layout using widgets to 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a post archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, customer testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizable 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 offer customizable 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 web 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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