There are many benefits to choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your website without web coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help add functionality to your site.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
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 it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techies.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in certain parts of your website without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- post comments
- advertising
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- videos
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will further enhance your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the header, the footer, and even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes have only a single widget-ready section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside the WP administration area and can be accessed from the admin menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section 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 and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact 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 appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in 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 section (2) is now placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some other useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your active 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 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar area by switching 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, 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 text ads, testimonials or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, video galleries, Facebook feeds, 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 configuration options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize these. 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP 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 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 different types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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