There are loads of great benefits to using WordPress for building and managing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets are ideal tools for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website or blog.
Widgets – What Do They Do? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or menu item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in certain parts of your website without touching 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 great things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- list of pages
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- text ads
- user testimonials
- polls
- RSS content
- opt-in subscription form
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other 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 add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the whole design of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will help further enhance your website’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can show up in.
Usually, widget-driven functions can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even below your content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside your admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets you 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 by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use on your site.
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.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we were to peek 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 the site’s active widget section …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are a few more things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the WordPress 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 have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do many things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing 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 to 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 changes (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve user 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 rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, images, Facebook 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 give you little to no configuration options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website or blog 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips on how to get 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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