There are lots of great things about using WordPress for building and growing your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange your site’s layout without code editing skills and knowledge.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily insert, delete, and reconfigure various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections, depending on your theme) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This blog post explains how widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you supercharge your website.
How Do Widgets Work? An Overview Of Widgets For New Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a self-contained module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your WordPress site.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you need to learn how to script code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too technical. As will soon learn, widgets are perfect for non-techie users.
WP widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding.
(Widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets allow you to:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions to areas of your site without touching any code, and
- Reconfigure the functional layout of your WP theme 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 many great things you can add to your site’s sidebar navigation area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested list of your web pages
- categories
- archives
- menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- excerpts of recent comments added to posts
- clickable ad banners
- quotations
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- opt-in form
- video
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, 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 even drastically change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes affect how widgets work on your website and a number of plugins add accompanying widgets that will fine-tune your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections on your site where widgets can appear.
Usually, widgets can be found in your sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the site’s header area, in the footer area, and even below or above the content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WP themes only have a single widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that the theme only includes one widget-enabled area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their website using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many WP themes provide a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas are included in the WP theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the administration by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
The Widgets screen 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 & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the widgets panel.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. automatically become activated for use on your site.
In addition, the Widgets panel includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your site. 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, as new plugins are installed on your website, you will see that new widgets have also been added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WP 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 remove them all within your Widgets area using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange your site’s widgets using drag-and-drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily rearrange the order and 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:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking 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 were arranged in their active widget area …
Let’s now change the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area using drag and drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the order of items in your site’s 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) is located above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Easy, huh?
Let’s go over some more things worth knowing about using widgets:
Widget Management – Customize Widgets Section
Depending on the actual WordPress theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to customize and manage 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 many edits, modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and see all changes in real time. If you like what you’ve 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 shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve shown you earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganizing sidebar layout with widgets can improve your site’s user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have 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 widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganizing sidebar layout 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add useful features like your website’s page list, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an archives section, menus that display only selected pages, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest user comments, a section displaying clickable images, customer testimonials or surveys, RSS feed content, video thumbnails, Facebook feeds, 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 give you little to no customizing options)
Many widgets offer various settings that allow you to further configure your site features. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or information, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets offer customization!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website or blog 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 great tutorials showing you how to use various types of widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus lots of cool tips on how to get the most 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you expand your business online. To learn more about using WordPress please see our related posts section.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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