There are many great things about choosing WordPress for building, managing and growing a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without having any code editing skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can expand the functionality of your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website.
WordPress 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 have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions to parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP theme 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in form
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide detailed information about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and alter the design of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header, the footer section, even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located within your WP administration area and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them right inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
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 WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the 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) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize 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 the live website.
You can do several edits to widgets 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 on your site.
(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 it (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve 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 your site’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising banners, client testimonials or surveys, RSS feed content, video galleries, social media sharing 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 configuration options)
Most widgets provide additional settings 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 offer customizable options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP web content management platform please see other posts we have published on this site.
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