There are loads of great benefits to using WordPress for building and managing your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you grow your website or blog.
WP Widget: An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or menu item to your WordPress site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As you are about to discover, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality to certain areas 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 many functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- site categories
- archived blog post entries
- menus that display only the pages you select
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable images
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content
- subscriber form
- product images
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new functionality to WordPress and even change the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that will further fine tune your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready sections on your site where widgets can be added to.
Usually, this is going to be in your sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be located in the site’s header area, in the footer, and even below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this specific WP theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found within your WordPress administration area and can be accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are 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 active.
Your Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their settings.
By default, 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 Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order of your website’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:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we change these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag-and-drop …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your 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 image button (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some more useful things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 the live website.
You can do many things to widgets 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 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, with WordPress you can quickly reorder how information displays in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the sidebar area by switching around 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 layout with widgets can 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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like nested page lists, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertisements, client testimonials or surveys, RSS feed items, video thumbnails, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable 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 customizing options)
Most widgets offer various 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customizable options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress web site 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 tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus many useful tips on how to get the most 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WordPress web content publishing platform please see other posts we have published on this site.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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