There are many great things about using WordPress for building and managing your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout without programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your web site.
What Are WordPress Widgets? Understanding WordPress Widgets For New Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WP widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their website.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to certain areas of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- pages on your website
- categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- user comments
- image banners
- customer testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- video
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional content about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further improve your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, the footer area, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget-ready section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized sections)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 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 WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and can be used.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily reorder the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize your 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 a number of edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, 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 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the site’s sidebar area 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 layout using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a blog post archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or surveys, RSS feed content, product images, 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 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 your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 customizing options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog 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 different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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