There are lots of great benefits to choosing WordPress for building and managing your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your website without web programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can enhance the functionality of your web site.
How Do Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your website.
WordPress is written using a scripting 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 program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your site.
(WordPress 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 of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions to certain areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- post comments
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, functions controlled by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, the footer area, and even below the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this specific theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside your dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-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. become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, 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 display in your Widgets section as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all right inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag & drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we change these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the 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 section (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some other useful things worth knowing about using WP widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do a number of edits in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your active 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!)
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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar 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.
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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archives section, menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or polls, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 settings that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site 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 Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips on how to get 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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