As we’ve discussed in this post, one of the many benefits of using WordPress to manage your web presence is that you can easily add content, improve your site’s functionality, and change the layout of your site without web coding knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage content on your website’s sidebar (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
Once you know how to use widgets, you can easily add things to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme) like:
- website page list
- post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy)
To learn more about what WP widgets are, how widgets work and how using widgets can help you expand your site’s functionality, go here:
In this step-by-step tutorial you will learn how to use and configure various frequently-used widgets in WordPress.
Using Widgets
The Basics
Before we start learning how to configure widgets, let’s go over some of the basic concepts about using widgets:
Most WordPress Themes Support Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in your theme’s layout where you can use widgets, such as the sidebar, header area, and footer sections. Depending on your theme, widgets can also appear inside the content area …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized areas)
These widget-ready layouts correspond to a feature inside the Widget administration panel called “Widget Areas” …
(Widget Areas)
Widgets Screen
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets by dragging and dropping)
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 the sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used for their purpose.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
Reorganize WordPress Widgets With Drag And Drop
You can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove widgets using simple drag & drop inside the Widgets section …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
You can also easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections with drag & drop ease.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display things like:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A ‘click to call’ feature from a widgetized plugin (i.e. a plugin with an accompanying widget) …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside the Widget area, you would see that the front end features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the back-end widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in the widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar navigation menu …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in the sidebar.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can improve your site’s user experience.
Note in the screenshot below that the ‘click to call’ function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar, and the support section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve user experience)
Deleting Widgets From Your WordPress Blog Sidebar Menu
Removing widgets from your sidebar is really easy.
For example, let’s delete the Search widget from your sidebar …
(WordPress Search widget)
To remove a widget from an active Widget area, you can either expand the widget and click the Delete link …
(Deleting WordPress widgets)
Or just drag the widget out of the Active Widgets section and into the Inactive Widgets section …
(Removing your widget)
Repeat this process for any other widgets you want to remove from your sidebar area. You can always restore widgets by dragging them back into the active widgets area.
Widget Settings
Most widgets can be customized further. This includes hiding information from users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc.
Click on the little triangle in the corner of a widget to display the widget’s settings …
(Toggles expand/collapse widget settings)
When the widget expands, you can change and save your settings, remove your widget from the “Active Widgets” section, close the widget, or click on the triangle to collapse the widget …
(Widget settings)
Some widgets offer little to no customizing options, or they may only allow you to add an optional title …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the WP theme you have installed, you’re also able to preview any changes live without actually making changes to your site. This way, you can be sure that you are happy with what you see before making any permanent changes to your site.
The ability to manage widgets from your WordPress dashboard is a great 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 (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen.
(preview widget changes live in the Customize section)
If you need to make changes to your site while viewing the frontend, just click on the Customize link …
(Toolbar Customize Link)
This will bring you to the Customizer section in the backend.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode (like inserting, removing and moving widgets around), and it’s all done in real time. If you are happy with what you have done, click the “Save and Publish” button and the changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site.
(Widget management – configure widgets on the fly!)
Once your changes have been saved, your site will automatically update the widget settings and display your new changes to your site visitors.
Since WordPress Themes can display elements differently on your site, we recommend that you install the theme first before configuring widgets.
Also, remember to use the Customizer feature to preview your changes. This will save 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 start configuring various commonly-used sidebar widgets in WordPress.
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This is the end of part one of this tutorial series.
Click on this link to continue:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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