There are so many great benefits to choosing WordPress for building, managing and growing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without code editing skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, what they do and how widgets can help you supercharge your website.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your site.
WordPress 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 write code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With widgets, users don’t have to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality to certain areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- website page list
- categories
- post archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- comments
- advertising
- user testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed items
- registration box
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will extend your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, the footer area, even below or above your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes have only a single widgetized section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WP dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use 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 activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly changes 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 section (2) is now placed 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 with widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, 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 have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do lots of things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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 have 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!)
Widget management 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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can improve visitor 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 your web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content excerpts, video thumbnails, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customization)
Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website or blog 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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