There are loads of great things about using the WordPress web publishing tool for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site with no coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your website.
What Is A WordPress Widget? Understanding Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your website.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions to parts of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- index of pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- text ads
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- opt-in form
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will learn in a moment, themes affect where widgets work on your site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your site’s usability.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, you will find functions managed by widgets in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, the footer area, even above or below your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only one widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-enabled sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 area)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located within the WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the WP dashboard menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all from your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar menu 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve user 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 your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add useful features like an index of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived blog posts section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys, RSS feed content, image galleries, Twitter feeds, 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site 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 customization!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website or blog 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great tips on how to get the most out of WordPress with 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 article has given you 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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