There are loads of great things about using WordPress to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site without coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help to supercharge your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your site.
The WordPress software 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 have to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to customize their websites.
(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in certain parts of your website without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- content categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed items
- subscription form
- video galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that will further improve your website or blog’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where widgets can show.
Usually, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, the footer area, sometimes even above or below the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only have one widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that the theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your 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 provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be easily accessed inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets you can 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 made Active or Inactive 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.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If you take a peek 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 they have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(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 instantly changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are a few other useful things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual 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 many things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WP 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 it (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar by switching around 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve 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 the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising, quotations or surveys, RSS content, videos, Facebook feeds, 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 customizable options)
Many widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like 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 customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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