WordPress Widgets Explained

This tutorial explains what WordPress widgets are, how widgets work, and how widgets can help you customize and extend the functionality of your website or blog.

WordPressThere are lots of benefits to using WordPress to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without requiring any code editing skills or knowledge.

WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.

Widgets

(Widgets)

This blog post explains what WordPress widgets are, what makes them so useful and how widgets can supercharge your web site.

What Do Widgets Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Beginners

WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier

(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)

A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website or blog.

The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write web code.

Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-techies.

With widgets, users don’t have to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance the functionality of their site.

WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to mess with code

(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)

Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.

In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:

  • Easily add, edit and delete features to certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
  • Reconfigure the functional layout of your 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 features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:

  • page lists
  • blog categories
  • post archives
  • customized menus
  • links to resources
  • most popular posts
  • recent comments from users
  • advertising
  • quotations
  • polls
  • RSS feed content
  • registration box
  • video
  • twitter feeds
  • display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
  • administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)

In other articles, we provide additional information about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your website.

As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website or blog’s functionality.

Widget-Ready Areas

Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can appear.

Usually, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header area, the footer area, even below or above your content.

It all depends on what theme you have installed.

For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …

Some WordPress Themes only provide one widget enabled area

(Some themes only have one widgetized section)

Below is the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …

What Do Widgets Do? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users

As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.

In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes various widget-ready areas …

Many themes provide multiple widgetized areas

(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)

Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …

Multiple WordPress widget areas

(Multiple WordPress widget areas)

As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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

(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)

How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?

The Widgets area is located within the WP admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets

WordPress Widgets - What Do They Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners

This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …

Widgets Section

(Widgets Screen)

The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are available.

The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …

Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop

(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-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. become active and can be used.

In addition, the Widgets screen 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.

Important

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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …

By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets

(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)

Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets section whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …

Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!

(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)

WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop

Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all right inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …

Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop

(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)

Use drag and drop to 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 show:

  1. A newsletter opt-in form,
  2. A click for support banner, and
  3. Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …

Widgets control how certain features appear on your site

(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)

Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget area …

How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners

If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …

Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order

(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)

The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …

A Basic Guide To WordPress For Beginners: Widgets - What Do They Do?

This instantly reorganizes the layout of 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) …

WordPress widgets are really easy to use!

(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)

Pretty cool, huh?

Let me just show you some more things worth keeping in mind with widgets:

Widget Management – Preview Widgets

Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.

You can do lots of things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting 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 have 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!

(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)

The ability to manage widgets from your 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.

Widget Configuration

As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …

Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site's visitor experience

(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)

In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar 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.

Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience.

Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?

Absolutely!

With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising, testimonials or polls, RSS feed content, product images, 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 configuration options

(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)

Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …

Most widgets provide users with configuration options

(Many widgets give you customization!)

How To Use Widgets

As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great tips for getting the most benefit out of WordPress using widgets:

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 website and how WordPress can help you expand 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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