There are many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website with no coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what WP widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help add functionality to your web site.
What Are Widgets? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
Widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance their website.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to parts of your site without touching any 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart information
- images
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide detailed content about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes can affect how widgets display on your site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will further improve your site’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Normally, you will find widgets at work in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, footer, and even above or below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget sections)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 3 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?
The Widgets screen is found inside your WordPress administration area and can be accessed from the WP admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
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 by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and available on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
With drag & drop you can easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If you take a peek 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 area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the 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 the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are a few other things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the WP 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 see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around 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 from your own 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the layout in the sidebar by switching around 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 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like a member login section, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, testimonials or poll results, RSS content, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, 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 customization)
Most widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of useful tips on how to get the most 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 issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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