There are lots of great things about using WordPress to build and manage your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your website without programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This post explains how widgets work, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can supercharge your site.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your site.
The WordPress software 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 script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon see, WP widgets are made for non-techie users.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t have to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to customize their site.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete blocks of code in parts of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display on ”widgetized” 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- post categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- recent comments
- advertisements
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- registration box
- product catalog images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide additional information about WordPress plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your website.
As you will see in just a moment, themes affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will fine tune your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in your site’s header, in the footer, and even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes provide only one widgetized section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that the WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple 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, so you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets section log into your admin and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up your Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see 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 areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active on your site.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them in your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reconfigure the layout and order of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
If we were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
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 function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
There are some more things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage 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 many edits in preview mode, like inserting, 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own 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 any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the site’s sidebar area by switching 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a newsletter registration form, or just add things like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a blog post archive section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, customer testimonials or poll questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 customization)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize them. 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus many useful tips on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress using 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues 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 other posts we have published on this site.
***
"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
***