There are lots of great things about choosing WordPress for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your site without having programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this article you will learn what WP widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help expand the functionality of your web site.
How Do Widgets Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For New Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
WP widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a script or item to your site.
The WordPress software is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WordPress widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to expand the functionality of their websites.
(Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove features to parts of your site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 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:
- site pages
- categories
- post archives
- menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- comments
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- polls
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart information
- videos
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect how widgets work on your web site and some plugins add accompanying widgets that can extend your website’s capabilities.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header area, in the footer area, and even below your content area.
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 displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some WP themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the above theme, where you can see that the theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains a number of widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes offer users a number of widgetized areas)
Below is the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your WP admin area and can be accessed from the WP admin menu by clicking on Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that you currently have available.
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. become active and can be used.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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, Categories, etc. to your site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing new WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WordPress Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them in your Widgets area just by using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using 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 example site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as they have been arranged in the active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Active Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of 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 section (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Here are some more things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – WP Theme Customizer
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed, you can also customize 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 several edits to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your WP dashboard 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 any changes (and avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly rearrange how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily change the order of elements in the site’s sidebar 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 web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add useful features like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, a post archives section, custom menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest comments, a section displaying clickable text ads, client testimonials or polls, content from RSS feeds, images, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable 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 configurable options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to 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 configuration options!)
Using WordPress Widgets
As you have just 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 corresponding widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your site, plus lots of great tips on how to get the most benefit 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this information has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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