There are so many great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing application for building, managing and growing a website. 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 or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can supercharge your web site.
Widgets – What Do They Do? A Basic Guide To Widgets For New Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions in areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 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 WordPress widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the design of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will improve your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header, in the footer area, even above or below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 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 Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within your WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel 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 & 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. become available for use.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
With drag and drop you can easily rearrange the 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 show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we took a peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of the 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) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your active 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WP 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 before publishing it (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the sidebar area by switching 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 with 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 your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or polls, RSS content excerpts, product images, Twitter 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 customizing options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips for getting the most out of WordPress using 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.
***
"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
***