There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no programming skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can grow your website or blog.
What Is A Widget? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a web 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 script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections in parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- post comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- polls
- RSS feed items
- subscriber form
- images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can show.
Typically, widget-powered functions can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the header, footer, and even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section can be easily accessed inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive 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 immediately available for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area as new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reorder the order and layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If we were to peek inside the example 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 area …
Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your 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 feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some more things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to 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 many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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 from within your own WP dashboard 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 before publishing it (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the site’s sidebar menu 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can 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 layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add useful features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, client testimonials or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 customizable options)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure things. 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have 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 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 lots of useful tips for getting 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WP CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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