There are many great benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build and grow a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without coding skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WP widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website.
What Is A WordPress Widget? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage many 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 WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections in parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your website
- site categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- text ads
- customer testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter subscription form
- video
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will learn shortly, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will further improve your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Usually, you will find functions managed by widgets in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header section, the footer area, and even above or below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widget area)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget section of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this WP theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 three 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 WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside your WP administration area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active.
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 site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
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 they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes 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 banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
There are some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the layout in the sidebar section 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 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 site’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, product images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like 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 offer configurable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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