There are so many great benefits to choosing WordPress for building, managing and growing your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring coding skills and knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains what WP widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website.
How Do Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Owners
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or menu item to your site.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to know how to program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WordPress widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program PHP or manipulate PHP code to customize your website.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to parts of your site without touching 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- blog post categories
- archive
- menus that display only the pages you choose
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- user comments
- clickable text ads
- testimonials
- surveys
- RSS content
- newsletter subscription form
- video
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Pinterest)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the entire design of your website.
As you will see in a moment, WP themes can affect how widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also come with accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website’s features.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show up in.
Typically, you will find functions controlled by widgets in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be in your site’s header, footer, and even below or above 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 for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes provide only one widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see that this theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets area is located within the WordPress dashboard and can easily be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets screen 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-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.
Your Widgets screen also 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.
By default, 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets section whenever new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them within your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily reconfigure the layout of your website’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 contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
If we were to peek inside the example 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 site’s active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the layout of the 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) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the actual WordPress 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do several edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your active 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 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 (to avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can help 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 menu by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, quotations or polls, RSS content excerpts, images, social media share 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 offer little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great 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, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using the WordPress web content management software please see other posts we have published on this site.
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