There are lots of great benefits to choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website with no code editing skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you enhance the functionality of your website or blog.
About WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features in areas of your WordPress site without touching any 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content
- newsletter registration form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your website.
As you will learn shortly, WP themes affect how widgets display on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can enhance your website or blog’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header, in the footer, sometimes even below the content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only one widget-ready section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see that the WP theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 section)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within your WP dashboard and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active.
The Widgets area also 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 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all inside your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reconfigure the layout of your site’s widget-enabled 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
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If you could peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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 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 you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly rearrange how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the sidebar menu by switching 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve user experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived published posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, customer testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration 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 customizing options)
Most widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further customize things. 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 customizing options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this information 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 using WordPress for a business website please see 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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