There are loads of great things about using WordPress to manage and grow a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout with no web programming skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your website.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or 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 learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your website.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying 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 additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of your web pages
- post categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- user comments
- advertisements
- customer testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in form
- video galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your site’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can be added to.
Normally, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide a single widget-ready area)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that the theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WP admin area and can be easily accessed from the WordPress administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays 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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and available on your site.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized 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 at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 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 prior to publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily 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-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or poll results, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, social media 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 customization)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site 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!)
How To Use WP 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 corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following 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 get better results online. To learn more about using the WP web content publishing software please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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