There are loads of great things about choosing WordPress to build, manage and grow a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without coding skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you supercharge your website or blog.
What Is A Widget? A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or item to your website or blog.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(WP widgets help you manage 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 manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete blocks of code to certain areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- advertising banners
- client testimonials
- poll questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see in a moment, themes affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that will improve your website’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Normally, you will find features driven by widgets in the sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, the footer section, even above or below the content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, so you can see that this specific WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-enabled sections)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
With drag and drop technology you can easily reconfigure the layout of your widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now change the order the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in 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 banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are a few other useful things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 the live website.
You can do a number of 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 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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you previously, with WordPress you can completely reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(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 layout in the site’s sidebar by switching around the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s user 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 your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add useful features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived content posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, social media 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 customization)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configuration options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of cool 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit 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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