There are loads of great benefits to using WordPress for building, managing and growing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without having programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your web site.
What’s A WordPress Widget? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP 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 website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to certain areas of your website without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 many functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- archived published posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- advertisements
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- opt-in form
- images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes affect where widgets display on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your site’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header, in the footer, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget section)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see that this WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside your WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays 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 areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
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
- 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 display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes 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 section (2) is now located above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other useful things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 the live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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 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 changes (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely reorder how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the order of elements 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 widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add useful features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising banners, user testimonials or survey results, RSS feed items, product catalog images, Facebook 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 offer little to no customization)
Most widgets provide 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many useful 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 website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"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
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