There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow a 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 with no code editing skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can add new functionality to your website or blog.
WP Widgets: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website.
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 have to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP theme 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- blog post archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- clickable images
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- shopping cart information
- images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed content about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and alter the design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your website and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further enhance your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find features driven by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the header area, in the footer area, even below the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific 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 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 Can I See My Widgets?
To access the Widgets section go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets you have 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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them right inside your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reconfigure the order 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 show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the order these widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of 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 graphic banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some other useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, 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 have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current 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 on your site.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WordPress 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 (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly and easily rearrange how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the widget elements in the site’s sidebar by switching 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve 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 your website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or poll results, RSS content, videos, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website 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 widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress web site management platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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