There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without web programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this article you will learn how WP widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you improve the functionality of your website or blog.
What’s A WordPress Widget? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Beginners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your WordPress site.
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 need to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove sections of code in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying 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 additional components you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertising
- customer testimonials
- survey questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter subscription form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes can affect where widgets display on your website and some plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can be added.
Usually, widget-driven functions can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header area, the footer section, even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only a single widget section)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains various widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(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 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)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside your WP admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays 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 & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all in your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
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 they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in 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 really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do several edits in preview mode, like inserting, 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 to visitors.
(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 changes (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve visitor 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 your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived published posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, images, 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 an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer 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 WP 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many great 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information 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 WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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