There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains how WP widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can improve the functionality of your website.
What Do Widgets Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their website.
(Widgets help you manage specific 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 manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions in parts of your website without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- list of pages
- categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- comments
- clickable images
- user testimonials
- survey questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- opt-in form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your website.
As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins add accompanying widgets that will improve your site’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find widget-driven features in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header, in the footer area, even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only have one widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains various widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section can be easily accessed inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays a list of 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 & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all within your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily rearrange the layout and order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the 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 order of items in the site’s 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) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing the currently added 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WP 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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorder 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-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and 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.
Rearrange 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 layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertisements, quotations or polls, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Many widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize these. 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 …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site 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 site, plus lots of great tips on how to get 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following 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 build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website 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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