There are so many benefits to using WordPress for building and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your website.
Widgets – What Are They? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections in areas of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of pages
- content categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- post comments
- text ads
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in subscription form
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes can affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can display.
Normally, features controlled by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header section, in the footer, and even above or below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that this particular WordPress theme only contains one widgetized 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 WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed from the admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are available.
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 activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
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 area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and 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 display:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and 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 modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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 to your site 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 great 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the site’s sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived content posts section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related 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 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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