There are loads of great benefits to choosing WordPress to build and manage a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this article you will learn what WP widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to supercharge your web site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your site.
WordPress 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 learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie users.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any 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 many cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of your web pages
- content categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable images
- client testimonials
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in form
- videos
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and change the entire look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can extend your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can display.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header, in the footer area, even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widgetized area)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this 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 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)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within your WordPress admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays 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 activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Use drag and drop to easily reorder the 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 show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few more useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do a number of things in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how content displays 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 …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can 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 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 an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived posts section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertisements, client testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further customize 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site 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 great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related 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 expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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