As we have discussed in this article, one of the many benefits of choosing the WordPress web publishing application to build, manage and grow a digital presence is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality, or rearrange your site’s layout with no code editing skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
Once you know how to use widgets, you can easily add things to your site like:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- text ads
- quotations
- surveys
- RSS content
- newsletter registration form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy)
To learn more about what widgets are, how they work and why widgets make managing your site easier, go here:
In this tutorial you are going to learn how to use and configure a number of commonly-used widgets in WordPress.
How To Use WordPress Widgets
The Basics
Before we begin configuring and using widgets, let’s first go over some of the basic concepts about using widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widget-Ready Areas
Many WordPress themes support widgets and provide built-in widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be used, such as the sidebar, header area, and footer sections. Depending on your theme, widgets can sometimes also be added below or above the content area …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
These widgetized layouts correspond to a feature inside the Widget administration panel called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
The Widgets Screen
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see the “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets with drag & drop ease)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like the sidebar, footer, etc. become active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
Reorganize Widgets With Drag & Drop
You can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove things using widgets just by dragging and dropping items inside the Widgets area …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
You can also easily reconfigure the layout of your widget-enabled layout with drag and drop ease.
For example, in the image below, the widgets have already been configured to display things like:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- ’Click to call’ buttons from a widgetized WP plugin (i.e. a plugin that adds an accompanying widget to your site) …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the Widget area, you would see that the front-end features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in the backend widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping some things around …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar section …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of the sidebar.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ feature (3) is now first the sidebar section, and the ‘contact us’ section (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve user experience)
Deleting Widgets From The WordPress Blog Sidebar Navigation Area
Deleting widgets from your WordPress sidebar is very easy.
For example, let’s remove the Search widget from the sidebar area …
(Search widget)
To remove a widget from an active Widget area, you can either open up the widget settings and click the Delete link …
(Deleting WordPress widgets)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and drop it into the Inactive Widgets section …
(Remove WordPress widgets)
Repeat this process for any other widgets you want removed from your sidebar navigation menu. You can always restore a widget by dragging it back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like hiding information from users (but allowing access to registered users), displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Clicking on the little triangle in the corner of a widget toggles between expanding and collapsing the item and displays the widget’s settings …
(Toggles expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, delete your widget from the “Active Widgets” section, close the widget, or click on the triangle to collapse the widget settings …
(Widget settings)
Some widgets offer little to no configurable options, or they may only allow you to add an optional title …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizing options)
Preview Your Widgets
Depending upon which theme you are using, you can also preview any changes live without making actual changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you like the customized edits before committing anything to your site.
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 the widget content will appear prior to publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area.
(Edit widgets live in the Customize feature)
When viewing your site on the front-end just calick the Customize link in the toolbar …
(Customize your site quickly)
This will bring you to the Customizer area in the backend.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments in preview mode (like inserting, deleting and moving widgets around), and see all changes in real time. If you like the results, click the “Save and Publish” button and your changes will instantly become available on your site.
(Widget management – configure widgets on the fly!)
After saving changes, your new updates will automatically be displayed on your site.
Since the WordPress theme you choose can affect how elements display on your site, we recommend that you install the theme first before configuring widgets on the sidebar section.
Also, remember to use the Customizer feature to preview all changes. This saves you from having to keep two browsers open while you work through this tutorial (one to work in and one to see the site the way your visitors will see it).
Now that you know the basics of using widgets, let’s begin configuring various commonly-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of section 1 of this tutorial.
Click here to continue:
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