There are so many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring any web coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can be used to help you improve the functionality of your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software 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 program code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain areas of your website without having to touch 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 features you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of pages
- site categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- comments
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- opt-in form
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the design of your website or blog.
As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that will further enhance your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header section, the footer area, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widget enabled section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this particular 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 WordPress theme shown below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 section)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside your WordPress admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets you can use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen 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 screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new WP plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reorder the order and layout of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Here are some more things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the WP theme that you have installed on your site, 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 these changes to the live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all 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 to your site 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 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar section by switching around 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.
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 reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying advertising, user testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure your site features. 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 customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many great tips for getting the most 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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