There are so many great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing your web site. 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 code editing skills required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains what WordPress widgets are, why widgets can make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you grow your site.
Widgets – What Are They? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(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 script or item to your website or blog.
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 web code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to see, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With WordPress widgets, you don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to parts of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- blog post archive
- menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- image banners
- quotations
- survey questions & results
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your site.
As you will soon learn, themes affect where widgets display on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website or blog’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Typically, features controlled by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header section, in the footer, sometimes even above or below the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WP theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget screen of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas this particular theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & 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 panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets area as new WordPress plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag & drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you 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 display:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of the site’s 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 button (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Here are some more useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 many edits in preview mode, like adding, deleting and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 to your site 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 prior to publishing it (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how content displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the site’s sidebar menu 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 layout using widgets can help to 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 website’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add features like a list of your site 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 post comments, a section displaying image banners, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS feed content, images, Facebook feeds, 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 offer little to no configurable options)
Most widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 customizable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog 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 various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips for getting 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
***
"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
***