There are loads of great benefits to using WordPress to build and manage a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring any coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how WordPress widgets work, what they do and how widgets can add functionality to your site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or menu item to your site.
WordPress is written using a scripting 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 program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to customize your website.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove content sections in certain parts of your site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 many great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments from users
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- product images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WP themes affect how widgets work on your site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will further enhance your site’s usability.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can appear.
Normally, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the header, footer, sometimes even above or below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide one widget area)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within your WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed from the administration menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and available.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
With drag & drop you can easily rearrange the layout and order 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:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
If we take a peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we 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 immediately changes the order of items in your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic banner (2) is placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some more useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize 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 several edits in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done in real time. If you like what you’ve 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 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 any changes you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how content is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements with 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or poll results, RSS content excerpts, product images, social media share buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customization)
Most widgets provide various options that allow you to further customize 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 …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 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 great 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress platform please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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