There are loads of great things about choosing WordPress to manage and grow your business online. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without code editing skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and reconfigure various types of content in your website’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, what they do and how widgets can be used to add functionality to your web site.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box 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 to a website, you need to know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to give WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete content sections to certain parts of your website without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- blog post categories
- post archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to recent posts
- recent comments from users
- clickable text ads
- quotations
- surveys
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter subscription form
- videos
- Facebook feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add new functionality to WordPress and even change the design of your site.
As you will learn shortly, WP themes affect where widgets work on your web site and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will help further fine tune your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can be added to.
Typically, you will find widget-powered features in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, widgets can also be located in the header area, the footer, even above or below your content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes have only one widget enabled section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget areas)
Below is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 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 area)
How Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within the WP dashboard and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets section in your browser …
(Widgets Screen)
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 made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different areas of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active.
In addition, the Widgets screen 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 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 your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your site, you may find that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them within your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag & drop you can easily reconfigure the layout and order 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 show:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features display on your WordPress site)
If you took a look inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget bar …
If we rearrange the order the above widgets in the Active Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the order of items in the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us image banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Let me show you some more things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending upon the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several edits, modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, 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 to your site 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange 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, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout with widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar section 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.
Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, product images, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no configuration options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further customize these. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer configuration options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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