There are many great things about choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help to add functionality to your site.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions in certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP 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 navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of pages
- post categories
- archived posts
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments from users
- text ads
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- opt-in subscription form
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also install accompanying widgets that will improve your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Normally, you will find functions driven by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header, the footer section, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes provide only a single widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget areas)
Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, where 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 two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 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)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found inside the WP dashboard and can be accessed from the admin menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are available.
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 widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, 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 when new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them from your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order 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 area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the 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 your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your WordPress 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how information displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the layout in the site’s sidebar by switching 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or poll results, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 configuration options)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further configure things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog 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 detailed 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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