There are so many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing application for managing and growing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to expand the functionality of your web site.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie users.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to areas of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- content categories
- post archives
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- recent comments from users
- advertisements
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the entire look and feel of your website.
As you will learn in a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further extend your site’s features.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, widget-driven functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header, in the footer area, even below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel go to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become available for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we took a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your 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 section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around the currently added 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your WordPress 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how content is displayed 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 help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching around 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 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add other features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, client testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed content, videos, Facebook 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 customization)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configuration options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some 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 web site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following 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 using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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