WordPress Widgets Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress widgets are, how widgets work, and how widgets can help you customize and extend the functionality of your website or blog.

WordPressThere are loads of great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no web coding skills and knowledge required.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.

Widgets

(WordPress widgets)

This blog post explains what widgets are, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help add new functionality to your website.

What Do Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Beginners

WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy

(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A 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 WP site.

WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to script code.

Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techie users.

With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of their site.

WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code

(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)

Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

Simply put, widgets let you do things like:

  • Easily add, edit and delete functionality to certain parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
  • Rearrange 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:

  • index of pages
  • blog categories
  • archived blog post entries
  • menus displaying only selected pages
  • links to external sites
  • links to your recent posts
  • comments
  • clickable text ads
  • quotations
  • survey results
  • RSS feed content
  • newsletter registration form
  • videos
  • Facebook feeds
  • add widgets from external sites (e.g. Pinterest)
  • administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website or blog.

As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further extend your website or blog’s functionality.

Widgetized Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.

Usually, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header section, footer, even above or below your content.

It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.

For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …

Some Themes only have a single widgetized area

(Some themes only have a single widget-ready section)

Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …

About WordPress Widgets An Overview Of Widgets For Business Owners

As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.

In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widget areas …

Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget areas

(Many WP themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)

Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …

Multiple widgets areas

(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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site's footer

(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)

How Do I Access My WP Widgets?

The Widgets screen is located within your WP admin area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets

A Basic Guide To WordPress For Newbies: About WordPress Widgets

This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser window …

Widgets Panel

(Widgets Panel)

The Widgets screen 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-and-drop

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)

Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.

Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use on your site.

Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.

Important Info

In a default WordPress installation, 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …

By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets

(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website …

Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!

(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 area using simple drag & drop …

Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop

(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)

Use drag-and-drop to easily rearrange the layout and order of your widget-enabled areas.

For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:

  1. An opt-in form,
  2. A contact support banner, and
  3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …

Widgets control how certain features appear on your site

(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)

Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget area …

An Overview Of WordPress For Business Users: What Do Widgets Do?

If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …

Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area

(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)

The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …

Understanding WordPress For Business Owners: How Do WordPress Widgets Work?

This instantly reorganizes the order of items in the site’s 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 graphic button (2) is now located above the newsletter subscription form (1) …

WordPress widgets are very easy to use!

(Widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty simple, huh?

Let’s go over some other things worth knowing about using WP widgets:

Widget Management – Preview Widgets

Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, 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 any changes to the live website.

You can do a number of edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 – 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …

Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site's visitor experience

(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve user experience)

In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the layout in the sidebar area 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.

Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve 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 your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add things like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, product catalog images, Twitter 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

(Some widgets provide users with little to no configuration options)

Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. 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 offer customizing options

(Many widgets give you customization!)

Using WP Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.

For some 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 improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many useful tips on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress using widgets:

Related Posts

If you are learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.

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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group

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