There are lots of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout with no web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you supercharge your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your website.
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 this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections in certain areas of your website without having to touch any web 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of pages
- categories
- archived blog posts
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable text ads
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- product catalog images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further fine tune your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can be added.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, in the footer, and even below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes have only one widget-ready section)
Here is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WordPress 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)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area can be easily accessed inside the WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
In addition, your Widgets area 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 pre-configured 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them from your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily reconfigure the order and layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange 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 your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 the live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added 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.
(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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar area 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s 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 website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add useful features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS content, video galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website 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 see our related posts section.
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