There are many benefits to using WordPress to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without having code editing skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help to supercharge your web site.
What Are WordPress Widgets? Understanding Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you control technical 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 website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to certain areas of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- index of pages
- categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable images
- quotations
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart information
- videos
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole design of your site.
As you will learn shortly, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, the footer, sometimes even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide a single widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that the WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-enabled sections)
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, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all from your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
There are some other useful things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize 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 several edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 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 before publishing changes (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived blog post entries section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or poll results, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site 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 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 web 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, 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 build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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