There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software for building and managing a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website without programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your site.
What Are Widgets? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website.
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 have to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features in certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- site pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will enhance your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the header section, in the footer area, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have a single widget section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is found inside the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated 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. become immediately available for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
With drag & drop you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of the site’s 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) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me show you some more useful things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, 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 these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing 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.
(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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar 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 elements using widgets to 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 the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog 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 advertising banners, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, 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 customizable options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizable options!)
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 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 great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of cool tips for getting the most 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WordPress website publishing platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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