There are lots of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website without code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can add new functionality to your website.
What Are WordPress Widgets? Understanding WordPress Widgets For New Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WP widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets don’t require you to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality to parts 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- index of pages
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable images
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- shopping cart information
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and change the design of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can be added.
Usually, widget-powered features can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have a single widget-ready section)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside your admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reorder the order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
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 banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now change these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the 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 graphic banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are a few more useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do several edits to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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 have 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have redesigned the sidebar section 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to 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 order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content, videos, social media 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 provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets offer additional options 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customizing options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many cool tips on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress using 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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