There are loads of great benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site without web programming skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, what they do and how widgets can be used to enhance the functionality of your web site.
What Are Widgets? An Overview Of Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website.
WordPress 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 know how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
With widgets, you don’t have to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of your site.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in certain areas of your website without having to touch any 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 additional components you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- site pages
- categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- clickable images
- customer testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- image galleries
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and change the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that will help further fine tune your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, widget-powered functions can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header, the footer area, even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WordPress themes have only one widget-ready area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, where you can see that this theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide multiple widgetized sections)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the WordPress 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 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 area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found inside your WordPress admin area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active on your site.
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 do not lose 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area as new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing WP 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, reorder and delete them within your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Using drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure 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 show:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar section in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now rearrange the order the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) is now located above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widget elements in the 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.
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 traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived posts section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, video galleries, 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 customizable options)
Many widgets provide 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
How To Use WordPress Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your website or blog 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 different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of great 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP software please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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