There are so many great things about using the WordPress CMS platform for managing and growing your digital presence. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without web programming skills and knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various blocks of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn what WordPress widgets are, why widgets are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can help to grow your site.
About WordPress Widgets: Understanding Widgets For Business Owners
(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 WP site.
The WordPress application 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 need to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds too geeky. As you are about to learn, widgets are made for non-technical users.
WP widgets eliminate the need to know how to program or manipulate PHP code to expand the functionality of your website.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your website without requiring knowledge of coding)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functions in parts of your site without having to touch any web code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your WordPress 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 things you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- nested page lists
- site categories
- archive
- customized menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- user comments
- clickable ads
- quotations
- surveys & polls
- RSS content
- subscription form
- images
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- 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 these add loads of new features to WordPress and even drastically alter the look and feel of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes affect how widgets work on your website and many plugins include accompanying widgets that can help further extend your website or blog’s functionality.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Normally, this is going to be in the sidebar menu, but depending on the theme, these can also be located in your site’s header, in the footer, sometimes even above or below your content section.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the theme shown 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 section)
Below is the widget section of the above theme, so you can see that this WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only location where you can add widgets to your site using the theme above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below includes a number of widget areas …
(Many themes provide a number of widgetized sections)
Here is the widget panel of the theme above, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this theme …
(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 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 Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside your dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your browser …
(Widgets Panel)
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 activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different areas of the widgets screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use.
The Widgets area also includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove any widgets that you no longer want to actively display on your website. 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 in your default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Search, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to your visitors …
(In a default WordPress installation, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new WP plugins are installed on your site, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them in your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag-and-drop)
Use drag-and-drop to easily reorder the order and layout of your site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to show the following:
- An opt-in form,
- A click for support button, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features display on your site)
Looking inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site’s sidebar area in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in the active widget bar …
Let’s now rearrange the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately reorganizes 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 place above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty cool, huh?
Let’s go over some more useful things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed, you’re also able to customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing these changes to your live website.
You can do lots of things to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your active widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and everything is 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets inside your own WP 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 widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area as discussed previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you previously, with WordPress you can easily and quickly rearrange how information is displayed in areas of your website or blog, like sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve user experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily rearranged the layout in 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 widgets into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Reorganize sidebar layout using 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in your website’s templates to rearrange the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like shopping cart forms, or just add things like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, a post archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, testimonials or surveys & polls, RSS content, video galleries, 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 customizable options)
Many widgets offer additional settings that allow you to further configure them. This includes 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 configuration options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WP website simply by activating a plugin and then dragging and dropping the plugin’s corresponding 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 kinds of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many useful tips for getting the most 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 new WordPress user, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you improve your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business web site please see our related posts section.
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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