There are loads of great benefits to using WordPress to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website with no web coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can enhance the functionality of your website.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? Understanding Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website or blog.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to learn how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
With WP widgets, you don’t have to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to enhance your website.
(Widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections in certain parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your theme 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:
- pages on your site
- site categories
- blog post archive
- custom menus
- links to external sites
- links to your recent posts
- user comments
- clickable text ads
- customer testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- shopping cart forms
- images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add new functionality to WordPress and change the design of your site.
As you will soon discover, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine tune your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Typically, you will find features controlled by widgets in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the site’s header area, in the footer section, even above or 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 has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only one widget area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, so you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only location where you can add widgets to your website using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below includes multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(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 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)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is found within the WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays 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 and drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become activated for use.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them in your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A newsletter subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your site)
If you were to peek inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we change the above widgets in the 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 your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the order of items in 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) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Here are some more things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 on your site.
(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 prior to publishing any changes you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can help to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the site’s 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 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like an opt-in subscription form, or just add useful features like a list of pages on your website, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a post archives section, menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying advertising, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS content, product catalog images, social media buttons, 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 customizable 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 …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP 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 great tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP CMS platform please see our related posts section.
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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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