There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout with no code editing skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they are great tools for non-technical users and how widgets can expand the functionality of your website.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete sections of code to areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of your web pages
- site categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- comments
- advertisements
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed items
- subscription form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed content about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even change the design of your website.
As you will learn in just a moment, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your site and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your site’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, functions powered by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header section, in the footer area, even below or above the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only a single widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this specific WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas the 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
By default, 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily reconfigure the order of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Looking 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 they were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of the 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 section (2) is found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some other things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around 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 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 before publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar menu by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements using 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising, quotations or poll results, RSS feed content, video galleries, social media buttons, 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 customization)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable 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 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 great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many great 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 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 software please see other posts we have published on this site.
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org
***