There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software for building and growing a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without requiring coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you grow your site.
What’s A Widget? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
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 know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets don’t require users to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their sites.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code to certain parts of your site without having to touch any web 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of your web pages
- content categories
- archived posts
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- customer testimonials
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn in a moment, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the header, the footer area, sometimes even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located inside the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the WP dashboard menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area 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-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 and available on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
By default, 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own 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 any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in the sidebar area 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 layout using widgets can improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add things like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived published posts section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or survey results, RSS feed items, product images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following 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 improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see 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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