There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout with no web programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content in your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why widgets make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help you supercharge your website.
Widgets – What Do They Do? An Overview Of Widgets For Beginners
(Widgets 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 list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you need to know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon see, WP widgets are made for non-techie users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to enhance the functionality of their websites.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality in certain areas of your site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 features you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- index of pages
- content categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- advertisements
- testimonials
- surveys & polls
- RSS feed content
- customers login section
- video
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how these easily add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, themes can affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will help further fine-tune your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, you will find features driven by widgets in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, footer, and even below the content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only have one widget section)
Here is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see that this particular theme only contains 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 below includes a number of different widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes provide a number of widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located within the WP admin area and can easily be accessed from the dashboard menu by selecting Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become active and available on your site.
In addition, the Widgets area includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them right inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily reorder the order and layout 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 display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget section …
If we change the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) is now placed above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let me show you some other useful things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending on the theme that you have installed, you can also customize and manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to the live website.
You can do many edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, deleting and moving around your current 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 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 prior to publishing it (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can completely rearrange how content displays 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 …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can 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 your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, a blog post archive section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, links to your recent posts, the latest post comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, testimonials or polls & surveys, RSS content, images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customization, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Most widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
Using 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 corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many great tips for getting 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post 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 our related posts section.
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