There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring any code editing skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what WordPress widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to enhance the functionality of your site.
WP Widget: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your site.
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 code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to see, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their websites.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain parts of your site without touching 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 many great things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of your web pages
- content categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- text ads
- quotations
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter subscription form
- videos
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide detailed information about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further extend your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header section, footer, sometimes even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have one widget enabled section)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that this theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above 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 sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside your WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily reorder the layout and order of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few more things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing 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 on your site to 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can completely rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the layout in the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 static 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 user registration areas, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or polls, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes 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 offer configurable 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 WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many useful 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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