There are loads of great things about using WordPress for building, managing and growing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without requiring programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how widgets work, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can help add functionality to your website or blog.
What Do WordPress Widgets Do? An Introduction To Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP 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 site.
The WordPress application is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality to areas of your website without touching any web 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archived content posts
- customized menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- advertisements
- quotations
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed content
- subscriber form
- videos
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide more detailed explanations of WP plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add new functionality to WordPress and alter the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will see in just a moment, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further improve your website’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Typically, features powered by widgets can be found in the sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header section, the footer, sometimes even below the content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only provide one widgetized area)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the theme shown above, and you can see that the theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users a number of widget-enabled areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular WordPress theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
Where Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets screen is found inside your WordPress admin area and can be easily accessed from the administration menu by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets area in your browser window …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that can be used 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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and can be used.
Your Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to your 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 are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them inside your Widgets section just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag and drop technology to easily reorder the order of your website’s widget-enabled 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 contact support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of the site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now the first item on the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) has been moved to the place above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty good stuff, huh?
There are some other useful things about WordPress widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to your live website.
You can do lots of edits, modifications and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current 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 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 changes (and avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely rearrange how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily rearranged the site’s sidebar area by switching around 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add other features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, custom page menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, quotations or polls & surveys, RSS feed content, 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no customizable options)
Most widgets provide various settings that allow you to further customize these. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets provide users with customizable 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 web 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus lots of useful 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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