There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool to build and manage your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without web programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to grow your website or blog.
What Are Widgets? An Introduction To Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your website.
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 learn how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-techie users.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your website.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to certain areas of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable images
- customer testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed items
- opt-in form
- images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your site’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, features powered by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header section, the footer area, even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that the WP theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, 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 includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with 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 area)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within the WP administration area and can be easily accessed from the administration menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
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 activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- 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 appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Here are a few more useful things worth keeping in mind when using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize 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, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 on your site.
(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 it (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help 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 web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising, testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS content excerpts, images, 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 configurable options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like 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 give you configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips on how to get the most 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
***