There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no programming skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website or blog.
What Is A WordPress Widget? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your WP site.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features in parts of your website without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 many cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- post archives
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- post comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- poll results
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart information
- product catalog images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the design of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can extend your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Typically, functions managed by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header section, footer, even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only have one widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular 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 area)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is found within your WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and can be used.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in the 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) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let me just show you some other useful things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WP 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely rearrange how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar area 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add features like a list of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, 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 configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have 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 click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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