There are many great things about using the WordPress web publishing tool to build and grow a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange the layout of your website with no coding skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control 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 post you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to add functionality to your site.
What’s A Widget? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to enhance their site.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections in certain areas of your website without touching any 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- index of pages
- site categories
- post archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ad banners
- customer testimonials
- polls & surveys
- content from RSS feeds
- shopping cart forms
- video galleries
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets display on your site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further extend your site’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can display.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header, in the footer area, sometimes even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only a single widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the above theme, and you can see that this theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains a number of widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WP theme …
(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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets panel log into your WP admin and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets area when new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily rearrange the layout of your widgetized sections.
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 contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
If we were to peek inside this 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 bar …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in your 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) is now found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some other useful things about WP widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to 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 many things to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your active 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!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your dashboard 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 changes (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly and easily reorder how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help 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 a member login section, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, a post archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, quotations or polls, RSS content, 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 configuration options)
Most widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizable options!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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