There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website with no programming skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your website or blog.
What Do Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets 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 list item to your website.
WordPress 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets don’t require you to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to customize your website.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to areas of your website without touching 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- site categories
- archives
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- image banners
- client testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter subscription form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can be added to.
Usually, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header, in the footer area, even below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel 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-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. instantly become active and available on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all from your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order 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 the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
If we change the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in the 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) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few other things about using WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 the live website.
You can do many things 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 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the layout in the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve 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 order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or poll results, RSS feed items, image galleries, social media sharing buttons, 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
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 WordPress site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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