There are so many benefits to choosing WordPress for building, managing and growing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your website without having any programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can grow your website.
WordPress Widgets – What Are They? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your site.
The WordPress application 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 know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed 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 add, edit and remove functionality to certain parts 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- site categories
- archived blog posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- customers login section
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and alter the design of your site.
As you will learn shortly, WP themes affect how widgets display on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the site’s header section, in the footer area, sometimes even above or below the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that the WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within your WP admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-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. immediately become activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget section …
If we change the order these 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 the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in the 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few other things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 on your site to 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor 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 your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or poll results, RSS feed content, image galleries, Twitter feeds, 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 offer little to no customization)
Many widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer 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 website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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 boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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