There are many benefits to choosing WordPress to build and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your website.
WP Widget: Understanding Widgets For Newbies
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their sites.
(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality to certain parts of your site without touching any web 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- user comments
- advertising
- user testimonials
- survey results
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will extend your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the header section, in the footer, sometimes even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes have only a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your admin and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the 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 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 …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all within your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reorder the layout 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 display:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are a few other useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WP 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do a number of things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your 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 errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar layout 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived published posts section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ads, client testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website 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.
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
***