There are many great benefits to choosing WordPress for managing and growing a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without web programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how WP widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your website.
What Do Widgets Do? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techies.
With WP widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your website.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in certain areas of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 great things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your website
- site categories
- archived blog post entries
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- user comments
- image banners
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart information
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed information about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and change the whole design of your site.
As you will see in just a moment, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will further extend your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.
Usually, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header section, the footer, and even above or 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 adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes have only a single widget area)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area can be easily accessed inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of 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-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and can be used.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget section …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the 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 reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around 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’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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the sidebar area 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can improve your site’s visitor 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 site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, 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 options that allow you to further configure them. 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 customization!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily 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 great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many great tips for getting 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 new WordPress user, 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 improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress software please see our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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