There are many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site with no web programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains how WordPress widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to add new functionality to your website or blog.
How Do Widgets Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or list item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to write web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in parts of your site without having to touch 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 many cool things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- blog post categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable ads
- client testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed items
- newsletter subscription form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new functionality to WordPress and even change the design of your website.
As you will learn shortly, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can improve your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header area, in the footer, sometimes even below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes have only a single widgetized section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widget areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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)
Where Can I See My WP Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside your administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the screen 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 areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used 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 website. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag & drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the order 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 show:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If you were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the order of items in your 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 image banner (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are a few more things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing your current 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!)
Widget management 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily change the layout in the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout with 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 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 opt-in forms, or just add things like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived posts section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, testimonials or surveys & polls, 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 customizable 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 customizable options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure things. This includes 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great tips on how to get the most 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site 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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