There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without having web programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how WP widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help add functionality to your website.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs 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, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets don’t require users to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their sites.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to areas of your site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- website page list
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- recent comments from users
- text ads
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content excerpts
- customers login section
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide additional information about WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your site’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even below or above the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget enabled area)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget areas)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section can be accessed inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads 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 window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them within your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the layout and 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 display the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (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) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do several things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing 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 have done and click the “Save and Publish” button, your changes will then be instantly updated and reflected on your site to 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar by switching around 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.
Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can 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, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add other features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertisements, client testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 provide users with customization!)
Using WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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 website, plus many cool tips on how to get the most benefit 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues 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 please see our related posts section.
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