There are loads of great benefits to using WordPress for managing and growing your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website without requiring web programming skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains what WP widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help you to add functionality to your website or blog.
WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP theme 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 things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- customers login section
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and even change the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can show up in.
Normally, features managed by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, in the footer, even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside your WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & 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 active and can be used on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area 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.
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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this 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 appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some more things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several edits in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around 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!)
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 your widget content will appear before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s visitor 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 the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or poll questions & results, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customization)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just 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 widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips for getting the most benefit 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems 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 please see our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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