There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress web publishing software for building, managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without having any web coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help improve the functionality of your website or blog.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions in parts of your website without touching any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- subscription form
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide additional information about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can enhance your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the header area, the footer, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see 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. instantly become active.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the order of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in 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 on your site appear)
If we could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main 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 instantly 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 located above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are some other things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize your 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 the live website.
You can do several edits, 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 it’s all 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like a list of site pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived blog post entries section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, user testimonials or polls, RSS feed items, 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with configuration options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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