There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software to build and grow your web site. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your website and reconfigure the layout of your website with no programming skills required.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
In this post you will learn what widgets are, why they are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to improve the functionality of your site.
Widgets – What Do They Do? An Introduction To WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WP widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a functionality, or a text box or list item to your WordPress 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 know how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without having to touch code.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete content sections to certain areas of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure how various elements display on ”widgetized” areas of your site (e.g. the sidebar, header, footer and other areas) using drag-and-drop technology.
Here are just some of the things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- categories
- archive
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- post comments
- clickable ads
- client testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- newsletter registration form
- images
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new features to WordPress and change the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will learn shortly, WordPress themes affect how widgets work on your site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can further extend your site’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-ready areas in the theme’s layout where you can have widgets in.
Normally, features powered by widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be found in the site’s header section, the footer section, and even below the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widget-ready area)
Here is the widget panel of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only area where you can add widgets to your site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget areas …
(Many WP themes offer users multiple widget-ready sections)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas are included in this 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 section)
Where Do I Access My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings you to the Widgets section in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets section displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
The right-hand section of the window displays 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. automatically become active and can be used on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any 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 several 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 …
(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 may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets area …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them from your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Use drag & drop technology to easily rearrange the order of your widget-enabled areas.
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 banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your WordPress site)
If we took a peek inside the example 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 the active widget area …
Let’s now reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now at the top of the sidebar menu, and the contact us graphic button (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some more useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize and manage 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 the live website.
You can do a number of edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing the currently added 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!)
The ability to manage widgets from within your own dashboard 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 (and avoid making errors), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily reorganize how information displays in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar layout using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar area by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve user 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 reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a customers login section, or just add things like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archived published posts section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or survey questions & results, content from RSS feeds, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configuration options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer various 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 data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizable options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website or blog 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of useful tips for getting 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see 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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