There are many great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building and growing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help expand the functionality of your web site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of your web pages
- post categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- text ads
- customer testimonials
- survey results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter subscription form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets work on your web site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your site’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.
Typically, widget-driven functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header area, the footer area, even above or below your content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes have only one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only includes 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 in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found inside the WordPress dashboard and can be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
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 activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reconfigure the order of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in 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 banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few more things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, 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 your live website.
You can do lots of edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your active 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own dashboard 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 it (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily rearrange 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 technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the sidebar 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help 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 reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, client testimonials or polls, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, social media buttons, 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 offer little to no customization)
Many widgets provide various options 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have just 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 corresponding 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 web site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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 new at 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 web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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