There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types of content from your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help add new functionality to your web site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WordPress widgets eliminate the need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions in certain parts of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- recent comments
- clickable images
- client testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart forms
- videos
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and alter the entire design of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further improve your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, functions managed by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header, in the footer section, even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only a single widget enabled area)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this WordPress theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within your WordPress administration area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area 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 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. become active and available.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them within your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
If we could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget area …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some more things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage 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 many edits, modifications and adjustments 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 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!)
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 errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the layout in the site’s 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve your site’s visitor 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 reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or surveys, RSS content, video galleries, social media buttons, 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 provide users with little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various 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 information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer 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 web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool tips for getting the most 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have 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 other posts we have published on this site.
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***