There are so many great things about using the WordPress web publishing software for building and managing 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 code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how WordPress widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your web site.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a web 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 too geeky. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in certain areas of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 many additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable text ads
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- video thumbnails
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional information about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further extend your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the header area, in the footer area, and even below the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Here is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this specific 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 area)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets section log into your administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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. immediately become available for use on your site.
Your 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several 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 new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them within your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & 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 reorganizes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few more things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing 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!)
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 prior to publishing it (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the layout in the site’s sidebar area 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout 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 many static 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 useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or survey results, RSS feed items, product images, social media 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many great tips for getting the most benefit 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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