There are many benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building and growing your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring any coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how WP widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help to supercharge your web site.
WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or menu item to your website.
The WordPress application 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 know how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any web 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- index of pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can improve your website’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, widget-powered features can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, in the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only a single widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains multiple widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widgetized areas)
Here is the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
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-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the order and layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Sidebar 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 your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in 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) is placed above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the 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.
Reorganize 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS feed content, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 customizable options)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website 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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