There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application to build and manage a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without requiring code editing skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to help you grow your web site.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-technical users.
With widgets, users don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their site.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code to parts 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- categories
- post archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- advertising
- quotations
- surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart information
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will help further extend your website’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, features managed by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header section, in the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only one widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that the theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets you can use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily rearrange the 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 show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display 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 their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget area …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and 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 your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in your 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 banner (2) is now located above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your 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 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 before publishing it (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar menu by switching 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, client testimonials or survey results, RSS content excerpts, videos, Facebook 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have just 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 widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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