There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform to build and manage your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, enhance your site and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring programming skills or knowledge.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This article explains what widgets are, why widgets are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can help you grow your site.
What Are WordPress Widgets? An Introduction To Widgets For Business Website Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A WordPress widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu item to your website.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to discover, WordPress widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily add, edit and remove functionality to parts of your site without having to touch any code, and
- Reconfigure 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of your web pages
- post categories
- blog post archive
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- links to your recent posts
- comments
- advertising banners
- testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS feed content
- registration box
- videos
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and alter the look and feel of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins also install accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your website’s features.
Widgetized Themes
Most WordPress themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Normally, widget-driven features can be found in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header area, the footer area, and even below or above your content area.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some themes have only one widget-ready section)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see that this specific theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and 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, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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 section)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets area go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets area displays 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 activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become available for use.
In addition, your Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured settings.
In a default WordPress installation, 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to your visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets section as new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them inside your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the layout of your site’s widgetized 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 banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in your 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 section (2) can now be found above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let me show you some more useful things about widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending on the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do several things to your widgets in preview mode, like adding, 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 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 it (and avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorder how content is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout using widgets can improve your site’s visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the layout in the site’s sidebar menu 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 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 many static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add other features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, customized menus, 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, RSS feed items, images, social media 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 provide users with little to no configuration options)
Most widgets offer additional options that allow you to further configure things. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customization!)
Using Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips on how to get the most benefit 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 issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website or blog please see our related posts section.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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