There are so many great benefits to using WordPress for building and growing a website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and reconfigure your site’s layout without having any programming skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what WP widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you supercharge your site.
What Are WordPress Widgets? Understanding Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WordPress widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or menu item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functions in parts of your website without having to touch any web 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- pages on your site
- post categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable images
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- newsletter subscription form
- videos
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the whole design of your site.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine tune your website’s performance.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can be added.
Usually, widgets can be found in your sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in your site’s header, footer, sometimes even above or below your content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have a single widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that the theme only includes 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 section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets area 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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all within your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in 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)
If we could peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget area …
If we change the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are a few other things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 a number of edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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 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 before publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you quickly and easily rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the sidebar area 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable images, user testimonials or survey results, RSS content excerpts, images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 customizable options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure your site features. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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