There are loads of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage a business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure 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)
This blog post explains what WordPress widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website or blog.
What’s A Widget? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your WP site.
The WordPress application 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 need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techies.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance their websites.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- advertisements
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart information
- video thumbnails
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can improve your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header, in the footer, and even below or above your content section.
It all depends on what 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 …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widget section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that this theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside the WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use on your site.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them from your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example 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 display on your site)
If we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget section …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some more things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 your changes to your live website.
You can do lots of edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can completely 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 button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar menu 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add features like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or survey results, RSS feed content, videos, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For some 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 website or blog, plus many great tips on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress with 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP web site publishing platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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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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