There are so many benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website without requiring web programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your website.
How Do Widgets Work? Understanding WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove blocks of code to certain areas of your site without having to touch any 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- site categories
- blog post archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- clickable ads
- user testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed content
- subscriber form
- image galleries
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even change the entire design of your website.
As you will learn shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your website’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, the footer, even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have a single widget enabled area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside the WP dashboard and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
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 sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them right inside your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some other things worth knowing about WP widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the WordPress 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 any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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’ve 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 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add other features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, testimonials or surveys, RSS content, video thumbnails, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 provide various settings that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of 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 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 click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***