There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing application to build and manage a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without requiring programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to add functionality to your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Beginners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality to parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- site categories
- archived content posts
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS feed content
- opt-in form
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide additional information about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, you will find widgets at work in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header, the footer area, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only provide one widget-ready area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that this WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located inside the WP admin area and can be easily accessed from the WP admin menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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. automatically become active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the order of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in your 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 section (2) is found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are some other things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do a number of modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own WordPress dashboard 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 errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the site’s sidebar menu 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve 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 site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS content excerpts, videos, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer 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 site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding 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 various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of useful tips for getting 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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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