There are many great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing a business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring any coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how WP widgets work, why widgets are great tools for non-technical users and how widgets can help to expand the functionality of your website or blog.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Website Owners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or list item to your website.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon see, widgets are made for non-techies.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their site.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality to certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any underlying 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- page lists
- blog categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- post comments
- advertising
- testimonials
- poll results
- RSS feed content
- opt-in subscription form
- images
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WP plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these add new features to WordPress and even drastically change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon learn, themes affect how widgets work on your web site and many plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can help further enhance your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can be added.
Usually, functions controlled by widgets can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, the footer, even below or above your content section.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only have a single widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this particular theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of 2 different page templates (Main Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar) and 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is found inside your WordPress dashboard and can be easily accessed from the dashboard menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently 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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and can be used.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of 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 your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure 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 show:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your site)
Inside this 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 site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of the 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 section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
There are some other useful things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, 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 several modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around the currently added 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own WordPress dashboard 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 before publishing it (and avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, with WordPress you can quickly and easily rearrange how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widgets in the site’s 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve 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 an opt-in subscription form, or just add useful features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archive section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising, quotations or survey questions & results, RSS content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer various options that allow you to further customize these. This includes 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be 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 useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of great tips on how to get 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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