There are so many great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site without having coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help add new functionality to your site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or menu item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality to parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- surveys & polls
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will enhance your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header section, in the footer area, even below the content.
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 …
(Some WP themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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 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 section when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in 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:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how 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 were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the order these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 the live website.
You can do a number of edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add things like a list of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising banners, client testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, video galleries, social media share buttons, 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 offer little to no customization)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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