There are many great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site with no code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your site.
Widgets – What Do They Do? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or item to your WP site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are made for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site 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 plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections to certain areas 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of your web pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- image banners
- client testimonials
- poll results
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and alter the design of your site.
As you will learn in a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will help further enhance your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the header area, in the footer, sometimes even below or above your content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes have only one widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this WordPress theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-enabled sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas the 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets section go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
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 activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them from your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily reconfigure the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your active 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 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 changes (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the layout in the site’s sidebar menu 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 visitor 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 your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a member login section, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or poll results, RSS feed content, image galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website or blog 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 various types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of cool 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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