There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building and growing a digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and control various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes them so useful and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your web site.
What’s A WordPress Widget? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu 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 need to know how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(WordPress widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in certain parts of your website without touching any code, and
- Rearrange 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 many features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- advertising
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole design of your site.
As you will soon discover, themes affect where widgets work on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further enhance your site’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header section, footer, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only a single widgetized section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WordPress admin area and can be easily accessed from the administration menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(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 widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and available on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 in the 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)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets section when new WP plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them from your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily reorder the layout and order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
Looking 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 the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 the live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current 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 to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own 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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how content displays in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the site’s sidebar area by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout with 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying image banners, customer testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS content, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide a number of options that allow you to further configure things. 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 …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily 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 boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of useful tips on how to get 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you 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 WordPress CMS platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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