There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no code editing skills and knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what WP widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you add functionality to your website.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features in certain areas of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- post categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- image banners
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- video galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add loads of new features to WordPress and even change the entire design of your site.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes can affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website or blog’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, the footer, even below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only one widget-ready area)
Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your WordPress admin and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If you take a peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing 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 have 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 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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the site’s sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets 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 website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived published posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or survey results, RSS feed content, product images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For 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 many cool 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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