There are loads of benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site with no web programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types 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)
This post explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can help you grow your website.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or item to your website.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order 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 the above sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets don’t require you to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your site.
(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions to areas of your site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your 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 cool things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- site pages
- categories
- archives
- menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- clickable ads
- client testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new features to WordPress and alter the whole design of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website’s features.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, functions managed by widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header section, in the footer area, and even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only one widget section)
Here is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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 Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets you have available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress 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 exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the 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) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several edits in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own 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 before publishing it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely reorder how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user 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 rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add things like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, user testimonials or surveys & polls, content from RSS feeds, images, social media buttons, 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 give you little to no customizable options)
Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further configure your site features. 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 configurable 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 web site 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 tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many cool 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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