There are so many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for managing and growing your web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your site without web coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can add functionality to your site.
What Do Widgets Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage 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 designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete features to areas of your website without having to touch any underlying 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS feed items
- opt-in subscription form
- video
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect where widgets work on your site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that can improve your site’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can be added to.
Usually, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the header, the footer section, even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes provide only one widget enabled section)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that this WordPress 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 shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-enabled sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside your WordPress administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of 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 & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and available.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find 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!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all within your Widgets area using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your site’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- 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 appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of your site’s 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 banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
There are some more things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also 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 your live website.
You can do several edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you have 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 before publishing any changes (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can easily rearrange how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged 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 widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s 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 site’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable images, customer testimonials or survey results, RSS content, image galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 …
(Many widgets offer customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips on how to get 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better 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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