There are so many great things about using WordPress for managing and growing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to expand the functionality of your site.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete blocks of code to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your 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 functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of pages
- categories
- archive
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- recent comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- survey questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart information
- video
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your website’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can be added to.
Normally, features controlled by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header area, in the footer, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have one widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widget 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 area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available on your site.
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 do not lose 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this 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 plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & 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 changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to 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 these changes to your live website.
You can do many things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing 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 have 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!)
Widget management 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 before publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the widgets in the sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user 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 web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertisements, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS feed items, image galleries, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to 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 Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website 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 tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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