There are many great benefits to using WordPress to build and grow a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without web coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, why they are great tools for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your website.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or menu item to your website.
The WordPress application 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 have to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
Widgets don’t require users to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance their site.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to areas of your website without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 features you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- site pages
- blog post categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- text ads
- client testimonials
- polls
- RSS content
- opt-in form
- product catalog images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new features to WordPress and even change the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, themes affect where widgets work on your site and many plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further fine tune your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Usually, functions managed by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in your site’s header, the footer, even below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only provide a single widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see that this theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress administration menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active.
Your 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 settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all in your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the 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 your live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
Widget management 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 prior to publishing changes (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content 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 …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help improve 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 layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, client testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, product images, social media buttons, 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 offer little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide various options 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 offer customizable options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP web site 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 tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful tips on how to get the most benefit 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 WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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