There are so many great benefits to using WordPress to build and grow your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout without having any web programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this blog post you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are great tools for non-technical users and how widgets can help you supercharge your web site.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to certain parts of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WP 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 many additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- links to recent posts
- comments
- advertising
- quotations
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- opt-in subscription form
- video
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide additional information about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new features to WordPress and even change the design of your website.
As you will see shortly, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can further improve your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, the footer area, even above or below your content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only provide one widgetized area)
Here is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located inside the WordPress administration area and can be easily accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays a list of 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 & dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets retain 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets area whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily rearrange the order and layout of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this 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 WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now rearrange these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image button (2) is now found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me just show you some more things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the WordPress 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do many edits in preview mode, like inserting, 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from your WordPress 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 prior to publishing changes (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how content displays in 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 …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have 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 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 your site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, video thumbnails, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizing options!)
Using 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 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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