There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout without programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can grow your website or blog.
WP Widget: Understanding WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to certain parts of your website without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most read posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content
- newsletter registration form
- videos
- social media buttons
- 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 plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the design of your website.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect where widgets work on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can help further extend your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header section, footer, even below the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes have only a single widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside your dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that can be used 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 activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets area whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s 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
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your 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 image banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, you can also 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 your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around 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 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 changes (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar section 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with 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 website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, 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 an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 customization!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool tips for getting the most 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 new WordPress user, 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 get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS software please see our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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