There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing tool for managing and growing your website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your site without web coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various types of content from your website’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you have installed) using widgets.
(WP widgets)
This blog post explains what widgets are, what widgets do and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website.
What Do Widgets Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Website Owners
(Widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding an enhancement, or a text box or list item to your WordPress 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 know how to script web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, WP widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to write code or manipulate PHP code to customize their sites.
(Widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to mess with code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functions to areas of your site without touching any web 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 functionality you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- pages on your website
- content categories
- archived content posts
- custom menus
- links to resources
- most popular posts
- user comments
- text ads
- testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS feed content
- newsletter registration form
- product images
- social media share buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we provide an overview of WordPress plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even alter the design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, WordPress themes affect how widgets display on your site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further fine tune your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, widgets can be found in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be located in your site’s header, the footer section, and even below your content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes provide only a single widget-ready area)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see that this WP theme only contains one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below contains various widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget-enabled sections)
Below is the widget panel of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with 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 section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets area is found within your WordPress administration area and can be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets you have available.
On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag-and-drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & dropping items to different sections of the panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become immediately active and can be used on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to use on your website. Inactive widgets do not lose their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in your default WordPress theme and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets get added to your Widgets area as 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
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all from your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily rearrange the layout of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to show:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A click for support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar area in the same order as they were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately reorganizes the layout of the sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) now sits above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool stuff, huh?
There are some more things worth knowing about using WordPress widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending on the actual WP theme that you have installed on your site, you can also customize your widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do a number of edits to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes 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!)
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 you’ve made (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content displays in areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements with widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have change the widgets in the sidebar section by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearranging sidebar elements using widgets can help to improve your site’s 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 web templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like shopping cart information sections, or just add other features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, a blog post archive section, menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying image banners, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS content, video galleries, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets offer little to no customizable options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize your site features. 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 sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress web site simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these great tutorials showing you how to use different types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of cool 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 a WordPress newbie, you may also find the following related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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