There are loads of benefits to using WordPress for building, managing and growing your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website with no web coding skills or knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and manage various blocks of content from your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how WP widgets work, what widgets do and how widgets can help enhance the functionality of your web site.
What’s A WordPress Widget? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or list item to your website.
WordPress 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 program PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too technical. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets don’t require users to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of their sites.
(WP widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of giving WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features to parts of your website without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange 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 many functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar menu (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- your most popular posts
- post comments
- image banners
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and even alter the entire look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn in just a moment, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that will further extend your website’s performance.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Usually, features managed by widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header section, the footer section, sometimes even below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have one widgetized area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the above theme, where you can see that the WP theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widget-ready areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this specific 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 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)
How Can I See My WP Widgets?
The Widgets screen is located inside the WordPress dashboard and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets screen in your browser window …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, 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 areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets get added to your Widgets area whenever new WordPress plugins are installed on your website …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
With drag & drop you can easily reconfigure the order 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:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
Inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget section …
Let’s now change these widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some more things about WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several things in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around your current 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 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 prior to publishing it (to avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you quickly reorder how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the widget elements in 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 widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements with widgets can help 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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the website’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like subscription forms, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, 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 user comments, a section displaying clickable ads, testimonials or survey questions & results, RSS content, videos, social media sharing buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizable options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 customizing options!)
Using Widgets
As you 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 corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool tips for getting 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 a new WordPress user, you may also find the following related 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 or blog please click on links to visit 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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