There are loads of benefits to choosing WordPress to manage and grow a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how WP widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to improve the functionality of your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions to parts of your website without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- index of pages
- blog post categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertising
- quotations
- surveys
- RSS feed content
- opt-in form
- product images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further extend your site’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, in the footer area, even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes have only one widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that this WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them within your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop you can easily rearrange 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 show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let me just show you some more things about using WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 several modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your active 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 to your site visitors.
(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 errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar section by switching 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, product catalog images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure them. 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 …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily 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 tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using the WP platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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