There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without having coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to grow your website.
What’s A Widget? An Overview Of 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 functionality, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to customize your website.
(WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to certain parts of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange 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 many functionality you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- index of pages
- post categories
- archived published posts
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- advertisements
- customer testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- subscription form
- video thumbnails
- social media buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- 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 these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header section, footer, sometimes even below or above your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have one widget-ready area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this particular 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located inside the WordPress dashboard and can be accessed from the WordPress administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you 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-and-dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all within your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widgetized sections.
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
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(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 the 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 graphic banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some other things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also manage 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 the live website.
You can do a number of modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, deleting 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 to your site 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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar area by switching 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.
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 site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archived posts section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ads, customer testimonials or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, videos, Twitter 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 configurable options)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize these. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As we have 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 related 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 different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great tips for getting 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 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 other posts we have published on this site.
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