There are loads of great things about choosing WordPress for managing and growing a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your website without having any web programming skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help to supercharge your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
The WordPress software is written using a web 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 script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections in certain parts of your site without touching any web 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 functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- post categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- post comments
- text ads
- user testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content
- newsletter registration form
- video thumbnails
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from other 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 these easily add new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that will help further fine-tune your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, in the footer, even below your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only one widgetized section)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area log into your administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the screen 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 active and available.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site 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 website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget section …
If we reorganize these 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 widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are some more things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around 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.
(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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, videos, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress web site 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great tips on how to get 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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