There are loads of benefits to using WordPress for managing and growing your website. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website with no programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can add functionality to your site.
What Do Widgets Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WP widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, WordPress widgets are made for non-techie users.
Widgets don’t require you to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features to parts of your WordPress site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- website page list
- blog post categories
- blog post archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- advertising banners
- client testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- customers login section
- image galleries
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide more detailed explanations of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how these can add new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire design of your website.
As you will soon discover, WordPress themes can affect how widgets work on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can enhance your site’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Typically, functions powered by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be in the header section, the footer section, even below your content area.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes have only one widget enabled section)
Here is the widget section of the theme above, where you can see that this particular theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below includes various widget-enabled areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(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 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)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets panel located inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets area in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that can be used on your site.
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 activated or deactivated using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain 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 Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets area as new WP plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all right inside your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
Looking 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 their active widget bar …
Let’s now change the order these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, 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) is now located above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more useful things about WP widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – WordPress Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage your 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 the live website.
You can do a number of things to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is done 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 to your site visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management 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 any changes you’ve made (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily reorganized the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can improve visitor experience.
Now … what about the widgets themselves? Can the widgets be customized instead of simply added, removed and rearranged?
Absolutely!
With many static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most read posts, the latest comments, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or poll results, content from RSS feeds, product catalog images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, 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)
Many widgets offer additional options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 …
(Most widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great tips for getting the most benefit 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 topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business web site please see other posts we have published on this site.
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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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