There are loads of great things about using the WordPress web publishing tool to build and grow your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without requiring code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how WP widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you add functionality to your website or blog.
What Is A WordPress Widget? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(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 feature, or a script or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete sections of code to certain areas of your website without having to touch any web 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 many functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- pages on your website
- blog categories
- archived blog posts
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- image banners
- customer testimonials
- poll questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- product images
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will improve your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, in the footer area, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only a single widget area)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas the 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If we take a look inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we change these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few more useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize your 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 modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like 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 your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the layout in the site’s sidebar 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can 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 order of elements, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertisements, testimonials or polls, RSS content, videos, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer additional options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be 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 tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues 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 please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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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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