There are lots of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow a website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring web programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains what WordPress widgets are, why they are ideal applications for non-technical users and how widgets can add functionality to your website.
WordPress Widgets: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web 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 this all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete features in certain parts of your site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display on widget-enabled areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the great things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- categories
- blog post archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- most read posts
- user comments
- advertising
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide detailed content about WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and change the entire design of your website.
As you will learn in just a moment, WP themes affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will further extend your website or blog’s performance.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where widgets can show up in.
Normally, widget-driven features can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in the header section, footer, and even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes only provide a single widget section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 three different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
How Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress admin area and can be accessed from the administration menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and can be used on your site.
Your 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.
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 Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all inside your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Using drag and drop technology lets you easily reorder the order of your site’s widget-enabled areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress 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 were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us 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 more useful things worth keeping in mind with WP widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the WordPress theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within 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 before publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the site’s sidebar by switching around 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 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 the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, customize features on page elements like a member login section, or just add things like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your blog categories, an archived content posts section, menus that display only selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or poll results, RSS feed items, image galleries, 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 provide users with little to no customizable options)
Most 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 data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configurable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress website 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool tips for getting 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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