There are many great benefits to using WordPress to build, manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange your site’s layout without code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, remove, and manage various types of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your website or blog.
WP Widgets: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a script or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features in areas of your site without touching any 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 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:
- nested page lists
- categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- recent comments
- clickable text ads
- testimonials
- polls
- RSS content
- member login section
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will enhance your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added.
Usually, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, in the footer area, even above or below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes provide only a single widget area)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, so you can see that the theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below contains various widget areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-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 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 actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
By default, 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 Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets are added to your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them within your Widgets area using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag & drop to easily rearrange the order of your widgetized areas.
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 button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we change the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-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 layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some more things worth keeping in mind with WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing 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.
(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 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 shown you earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archives section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS feed items, videos, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configuration options!)
Using WP 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 some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great 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, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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