There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what WordPress widgets are, what they do and how widgets can improve the functionality of your web site.
What’s A WordPress Widget? Understanding Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web 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 PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features to areas of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- content categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- clickable text ads
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins add accompanying widgets that will enhance your website or blog’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, in the footer, and even below or above your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this particular theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains multiple widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-enabled areas)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WP theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress admin area and can be easily accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
Your Widgets area also 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget area …
If we change the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are a few more useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also 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 many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 from within your WordPress 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you completely reorder how information displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the sidebar 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to 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 many 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 opt-in forms, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content excerpts, product catalog images, Facebook 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 offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer 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 website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips for getting the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, 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 grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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