There are loads of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing tool for building, managing and growing your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site with no programming skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your site.
What Are Widgets? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch 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.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections to certain parts of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 great things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- post archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable ads
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- member login section
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of 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 entire design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes affect where widgets display on your web site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can show up in.
Usually, this is going to be in the sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the header section, the footer area, and even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes provide only one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that this specific WP theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 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 Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your admin and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(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 activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately available for use on your site.
The Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all right inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this 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 WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are a few more things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own 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 changes (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, client testimonials or polls, RSS feed content, image galleries, 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 give you little to no customization)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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