There are many great benefits to using WordPress to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site with no coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how WordPress widgets work, what they do and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your site.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your website.
WordPress 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 program code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
With WP widgets, you don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your site.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features in certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- website page list
- content categories
- archives
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ads
- testimonials
- survey results
- content from RSS feeds
- subscription form
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can enhance your website’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Typically, you will find functions managed by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header section, the footer, even below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes have only one widget area)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within your WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed from the WordPress administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that can be used 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 made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, 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 display in your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all within your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily rearrange the order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
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 contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you took a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your 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 banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some more things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current 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 from within your dashboard 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily rearrange how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived blog post entries section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content excerpts, videos, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips on how to get the most 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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