There are so many great benefits to using WordPress for building and managing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website without programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help add new functionality to your web site.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or 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 code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, widgets are made for non-techie users.
Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections to areas of your website without having to touch any web 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- post categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- clickable ad banners
- user testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart forms
- video
- social media sharing buttons
- add 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 WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the entire design of your site.
As you will see in a moment, themes affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can enhance your website’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find widget-driven features in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, in the footer area, even below or above the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window 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 sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop to easily reconfigure the order 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 the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are a few other things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage 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 lots of modifications 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 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar section by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add useful features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, product images, Facebook feeds, 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 provide users with 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 …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you 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 useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using the WP platform please see other posts we have published on this site.
***
"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
***