There are loads of great things about choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build and grow your business online. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, what they do and how widgets can help you supercharge your site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
A widget is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a text box or item to your website.
The WordPress application is written using a scripting 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 it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, WP widgets are made for non-techies.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your website without the need to edit code.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions in certain parts of your site without touching any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WordPress 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 things you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested list of pages
- blog categories
- archives
- custom menus
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- clickable ad banners
- user testimonials
- polls
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter registration form
- videos
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Amazon)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and WP themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even change the look and feel of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins add accompanying widgets that can help further fine-tune your website’s usability.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled sections on your site where widgets can display.
Normally, this is going to be in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be found in the site’s header, in the footer, sometimes even below the content.
It all depends on what theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only have one widget enabled section)
Below is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that this particular theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area where you can add widgets to your website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready sections)
Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, so you can see how many widget areas the theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, you can add widgets 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
To use widgets, access the Widgets area located inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets panel in your browser window …
(Widgets Area)
The Widgets panel displays all the widgets that are currently available for use on your site.
The right-hand section of the screen displays your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become active and available.
Your Widgets panel also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets retain their pre-configured 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 right out of the box in the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets are added to your Widgets section whenever 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
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all in your Widgets section using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop technology lets you easily rearrange the order of your website’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your 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 …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This immediately changes the layout of your site’s 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 section (2) has been moved to the location above the newsletter sign-up form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let’s go over some more things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending on the actual theme that you have installed, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several edits and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing and moving around your current 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!)
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 any changes (to avoid making mistakes), or manage your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, WordPress lets you quickly reorganize how information displays in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the site’s sidebar section 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.
Reorganize sidebar elements using 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your web templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add useful features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying text ads, client testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Twitter feeds, 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 provide users with little to no customization)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site 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 configurable options!)
Using Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your website or blog 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 detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of useful 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 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 web site and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about the benefits of using the WP platform please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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