There are lots of great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without having any code editing skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how widgets work, why they are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application 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 program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets don’t require you to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions to certain parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- website page list
- post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable text ads
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed content
- opt-in subscription form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new functionality to WordPress and change the look and feel of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine tune your site’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Typically, widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the header section, the footer, and even below or above the 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 area …
(Some themes only provide one widget area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within your WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed from the WordPress dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
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 have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we reorganize 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 widgets have now been reordered in your 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 function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let me just show you some more useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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!)
Widget management 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar menu 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.
Reorganize 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, videos, Twitter 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 give you little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of 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 new at WordPress, 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 get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
***
"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
***