There are many benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no code editing skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, why widgets are ideal applications for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to enhance the functionality of your website.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets don’t require you to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance your site.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functionality in areas of your website without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display 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 site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- site categories
- archived blog posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- advertising banners
- quotations
- surveys & polls
- RSS content excerpts
- registration box
- video galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional content about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets display on your website and some plugins add accompanying widgets that will enhance your website or blog’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can be added to.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header, the footer, sometimes even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that the WP theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside your admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays 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 sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become available for use.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to 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 website, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them from your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the layout 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:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your 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 opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let me just show you some more things worth knowing about WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own WP dashboard 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 it (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can completely reorder how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with 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 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 elements with 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived published posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertisements, user testimonials or polls, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many cool tips on how to get the most 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform 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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