There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build and grow your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site with no code editing skills and knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to improve the functionality of your site.
WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script 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 need to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in parts of your website without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your theme 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- most read posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart information
- images
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will learn in a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins add accompanying widgets that will further improve your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can appear.
Normally, widgets can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header section, the footer area, sometimes even below the content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that the theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WordPress theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the administration menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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. automatically become active and available on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new WP plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order of your website’s widgetized 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 subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the 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 immediately 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 image banner (2) is now located above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do a number of modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current 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 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 prior to publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar section 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, content from RSS feeds, images, Facebook feeds, 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 customization)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have 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 for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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