There are many great things about using the WordPress web publishing application for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your website.
What Is A WordPress Widget? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality to certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- site categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- image banners
- client testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- customers login section
- images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further extend your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Usually, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header area, in the footer section, and even below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide a single widget area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 area)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located within the WordPress administration area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-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. immediately become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget bar …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & 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 …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of your site’s 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) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let me show you some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WP dashboard 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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorder 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 technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, 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 simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements with 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, image galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes 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 …
(Many widgets offer customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have 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 related 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 boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many cool 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using the WP CMS software please see our related posts section.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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