There are so many benefits to choosing WordPress for building and managing your digital presence. 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 without web programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help to supercharge your site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon see, WP widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code.
(WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove blocks of code to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Rearrange 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- image banners
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- subscription form
- product catalog images
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect where widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can have widgets in.
Usually, features controlled by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, footer, sometimes even below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have one widget-ready section)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are 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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used on your site.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reorder the order and 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:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
If we could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your 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 section (2) is now placed above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 your 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using 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 site’s 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 the site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising banners, client testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content, image galleries, 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 customizing options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure these. 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips for getting 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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