There are loads of great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for building, managing and growing your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website with no web coding skills required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and control various types of content on your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to program code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance their sites.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions to certain areas of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 many functions you can add to your WP site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- website page list
- post categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- user comments
- image banners
- quotations
- poll results
- RSS feed items
- opt-in subscription form
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. StumbleUpon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new features to WordPress and alter the whole design of your website or blog.
As you will learn in just a moment, themes affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further improve your site’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added.
Usually, widget-powered functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header area, footer, even above or below your content section.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes only have a single widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this specific theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, 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 3 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 WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located within your WP administration area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, 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 widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used on your site.
In addition, the 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.
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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them from your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag and drop lets you easily reorder the layout of your website’s widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this 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 WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
If you take a peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and 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 order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also 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 these changes to your live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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.
(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 you’ve made (to avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorder how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add other features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archived blog posts section, menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, product images, Twitter feeds, 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 give you little to no configurable options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related 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 different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 new WordPress user, 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 website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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