There are many benefits to using WordPress for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and control various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what WP widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help to grow your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in certain parts of your website without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP theme 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 great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- pages on your site
- site categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- registration box
- video
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes can affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the header, in the footer area, and even above or below the content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that the theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section can be accessed inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you have available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
By default, 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 Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all within your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reconfigure the layout and order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If you could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we change these widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered 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 function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and 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 lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 to 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 you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the order of elements in the site’s sidebar section by switching 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 layout with widgets can help improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or poll questions & results, content from RSS feeds, images, Twitter 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to 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!)
Using WP 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 corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips for getting the most 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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