There are many great benefits to using WordPress to build, manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to customize your website.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete blocks of code to parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- site pages
- post categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- clickable images
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- videos
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide detailed information about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets display on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will improve your website’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added.
Typically, you will find widget-powered features in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header section, in the footer section, and even below the content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only have a single widgetized section)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that the WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is found inside your WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed from the WP dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section 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 by dragging & 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 active and available on your site.
The Widgets screen also 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 pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all in your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of the 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 subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are some more useful things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several edits in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around the currently added 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add useful features like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, image galleries, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, 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 various settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post 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 the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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