There are many great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and growing a web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no programming skills or knowledge required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and manage various types of content from your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to help you improve the functionality of your website or blog.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Introduction To Widgets For New Users
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your website or blog.
WordPress 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 geeky. As you are about to learn, WP widgets are made for non-technical users.
With WordPress widgets, users don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of their sites.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to areas of your WordPress site without having to touch 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- list of pages
- blog categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- advertising banners
- customer testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can easily add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even alter the whole look and feel of your site.
As you will see in a moment, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that will further enhance your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can show.
Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header area, in the footer area, even above or below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding items to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes have only one widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this particular WP theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets section log into your WP administration and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, your Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section using simple drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
With drag and drop you can easily reorder the layout of your widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we change 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 reorganized in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) is located above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let’s go over some other useful things worth keeping in mind when using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you’re also able to manage and customize 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 your live website.
You can do many edits to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and moving around your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all 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 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 prior to publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how information displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the site’s 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.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help improve your site’s visitor 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 your web templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, customized menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising, customer testimonials or poll results, RSS feed items, images, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizing options)
Most widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize things. This can include things like 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 configuration options!)
Using WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many cool 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress 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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