There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing software for building and growing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring any coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can add new functionality to your website.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress 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 need to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
With widgets, you don’t have to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to customize your website.
(WP widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions to 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- index of pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed items
- subscriber form
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your site’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Normally, you will find widgets at work in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header area, in the footer, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 section)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is found inside your WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed from the administration menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays 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 & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become available for use.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how 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 have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & 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 reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
There are some more things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual WP 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 have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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 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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have 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 elements with widgets can improve 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 your web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived content posts section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS content, images, social media buttons, 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 customization)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your 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 WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website or blog simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus many great tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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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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