There are so many great things about choosing WordPress for building and growing a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add new functionality to your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress software 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 need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon see, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove sections of code in parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress theme 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 additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- pages on your site
- blog post categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- video
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will see in a moment, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can enhance your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can show up in.
Typically, widget-powered features can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, in the footer section, and even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide a single widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WP dashboard and can be easily accessed from the WP admin menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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 sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and available.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them from your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’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 button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …
If we change the order 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 reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly 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 banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do many things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your WordPress 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 prior to publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily 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 layout using widgets can help 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived blog posts section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertisements, testimonials or surveys, RSS feed content, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 customization!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great tips for getting the most 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 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 build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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