There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application to build and manage your website. 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 web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your web site.
What Are Widgets? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website or blog.
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 need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techie users.
With widgets, users don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance their website.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange 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 many great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- pages on your website
- content categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- videos
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and alter the entire design of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can show up in.
Normally, you will find widgets at work in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, footer, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have one widget-ready area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the WP administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets area as new WP plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all from your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
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 WP 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’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are some more things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage 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 the live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar section 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed items, product 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 give you little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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