There are so many benefits to choosing WordPress for building and managing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website or blog.
What Are WordPress Widgets? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or 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 have to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of their website.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- website page list
- content categories
- post archives
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- text ads
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter subscription form
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Usually, functions powered by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header, footer, and even above or below the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that this specific 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 theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where 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 2 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 area)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the WP admin menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag & drop technology you can easily reorder the layout and order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of your site’s 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 graphic banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon 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 have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within 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 before publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, user testimonials or surveys, content from RSS feeds, videos, 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 customization)
Most widgets offer various settings 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 information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configuration options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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