There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site without having coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content on your site’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 widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WordPress widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to parts of your website without having to touch 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of your web pages
- site categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- post comments
- clickable images
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- product images
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website.
As you will see in a moment, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further improve your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Usually, you will find widgets at work in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header section, footer, even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only one widget-ready section)
Below is the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that the WordPress theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so 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 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 area)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the WP dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active.
In addition, your Widgets screen 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.
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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reconfigure the layout and order 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 display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were 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 & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things worth knowing about widgets:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management is a valuable 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add useful features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls & surveys, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customization)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure 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 give you customizable options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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