There are loads of great benefits to choosing WordPress for managing and growing a digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web programming skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this article you will learn what WP widgets are, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to enhance the functionality of your website.
What Are WordPress Widgets? Understanding Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or menu item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for non-techie website owners.
Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove blocks of code to areas of your WordPress site without touching any underlying 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 functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- pages on your site
- site categories
- archived posts
- custom menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- user comments
- advertisements
- quotations
- polls
- RSS content
- member login section
- images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and even change the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can improve your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header area, the footer area, even below the content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes have only a single widgetized section)
Here is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WordPress theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, 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 WP theme shown below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widgetized sections)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, where 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WordPress dashboard and can be accessed from the administration menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them right inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription 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 on your site display)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize 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 widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize your 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 lots of modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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’ve 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 your dashboard 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s 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.
Rearrange 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add features like a list of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archived posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, videos, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, 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 configurable options)
Many widgets offer additional 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 offer customization!)
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 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of cool 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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