There are lots of benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software to manage and grow a web site. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your website and rearrange your site’s layout without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to 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 have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This article explains what WordPress widgets are, what makes widgets so useful and how widgets can be used to help you grow your web site.
How Do WordPress Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For Newbies
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A WP widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or item to your site.
The WordPress software 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 have to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your website without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple 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 features to parts of your WordPress site without touching any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 features you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- post categories
- archive
- menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- survey results
- RSS content excerpts
- registration box
- video thumbnails
- Facebook feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook)
- 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 these easily add new functionality to WordPress and alter the whole look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes can affect where widgets display on your website and some plugins also come with accompanying widgets that can further fine-tune your site’s capabilities.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Usually, you will find widget-powered features in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header, the footer section, even below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WordPress theme 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 enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see that the theme only contains one widget area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown below contains various widget areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 three 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)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets panel can be accessed inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets section in your web browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays all the widgets you have available.
The right-hand section of the window displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & 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 available for use on your site.
The Widgets screen also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want to use 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 the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your site …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all from your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the order and layout of your 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 click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget area …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes 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) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let me show you some more useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the WordPress 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 have done before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do many things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing 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 have 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 it (to avoid making errors), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearranging sidebar layout using widgets can help to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have rearranged the layout in the 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.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor 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 your site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add other features like page lists, or a dropdown menu of your content categories, an archived blog posts section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or surveys & polls, RSS content, videos, 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 offer little to no customizing options)
Most widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configuration options!)
How To Use Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For 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 boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see our related posts section.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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