There are lots of great things about using the WordPress web publishing software for building, managing and growing your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can improve the functionality of your site.
What’s A WordPress Widget? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
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.
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 have to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As you are about to learn, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WordPress widgets don’t require you to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your site.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove sections of code in parts of your website 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 cool things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to external sites
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- text ads
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed items
- shopping cart forms
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide an overview of plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine tune your site’s performance.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Typically, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header, footer, and even above or below the content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes have only a single widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains various widgetized areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas this 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 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 Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within your WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress administration menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your web 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 activated or deactivated using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become available for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new WP plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all from your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily reorder the order of your widgetized sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A 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 display on your site)
If we take a peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we rearrange these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some more things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed, you can also 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 lots of 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 on your site to visitors.
(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 it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorder how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned the sidebar area by switching around 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout 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 web templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like a member login section, or just add features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising, user testimonials or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, image galleries, social media buttons, 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 provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you configurable options!)
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 web site 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 step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips on how to get 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues 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 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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