There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress for building and growing your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout with no coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your site’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 WordPress widgets are, what they do and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your web site.
WordPress Widgets – How Do They Work? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box 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 that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to enhance your site.
(WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code in parts of your website without having to touch any web code, and
- Reconfigure 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 additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- list of your web pages
- post categories
- archive
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- comments
- text ads
- client testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- opt-in subscription form
- product images
- social media sharing buttons
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new features to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that will further fine-tune your website’s usability.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can appear.
Usually, features controlled by widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header area, footer, and even below or above your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide a single widgetized area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of different widget areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside the WP dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets area 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 by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and available on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets section as new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them in your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop to easily reorder the order of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
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 their active widget section …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your 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) is found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the 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 see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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 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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily reorder how content displays in widgetized 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 …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the layout in the sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed items, product catalog images, social media share buttons, 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 give you little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As we have 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 useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus many cool tips for getting the most 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems 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 see our related posts section.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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