There are so many benefits to choosing WordPress to build and manage your website. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your site’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without requiring code editing skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily insert, delete, and control various types of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
In this article you will learn how widgets work, why widgets are great for non-technical users and how widgets can help you to supercharge your website or blog.
WordPress Widgets – What Do They Do? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Business Website Users
(Widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
WordPress widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a web language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, in order to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write code.
Now … don’t worry if this all sounds like geek speak. As will soon discover, widgets are made for non-technical users.
Widgets eliminate the need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code in order to enhance your site.
(WordPress widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your site without requiring coding skills)
Widgets were originally developed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove functionality in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Rearrange the functional layout of your 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 functions you can add to your site’s sidebar area (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- page lists
- site categories
- post archives
- menus displaying only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- quotations
- poll questions & results
- RSS content excerpts
- registration box
- video thumbnails
- social media share buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. affiliate programs)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add new functionality to WordPress and even change the whole design of your website.
As you will soon discover, themes can affect how widgets display on your web site and many plugins include accompanying widgets that will further improve your website’s features.
Widgetized Areas
Most 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, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in your site’s header, the footer area, and even above or below your content area.
It all depends on the theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme in the screenshot below provides users with only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide a single widget-ready section)
Here is the widget screen 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 location where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widgetized areas …
(Many themes provide multiple widget areas)
Below is the widget panel of the above theme, so you can see how many widget areas are included in this particular theme …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in 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)
Where Can I See My Widgets?
The Widgets panel is located within the WordPress admin area and can easily be accessed from the WordPress admin menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your web browser …
(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-and-drop)
Available widgets can be activated or deactivated by dragging-and-dropping items to different sections of the screen.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately 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 website. Inactive widgets retain 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and remove them all in your Widgets section using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag & drop)
With drag-and-drop you can easily reorder the order of your widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized 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’s sidebar section in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets were arranged in the site’s active widget bar …
If we reorganize the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
This instantly reorganizes the layout of the 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) has been moved to the place above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple stuff, huh?
Here are some other useful things worth keeping in mind with widgets:
Widget Management – Theme Customizer
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you’re also able to manage 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 many edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, removing and reorganizing your current 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 on your site to 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 (and avoid making mistakes), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained in an earlier example, WordPress lets you easily and quickly rearrange how content is displayed in areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Rearrange sidebar elements using widgets to improve your site’s user experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s sidebar area by switching around 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.
Reorganizing sidebar elements using widgets can help 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 most traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to rearrange the layout, make unique customizations to features on page elements like a member login section, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archives section, custom menus, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying advertising banners, user testimonials or poll results, RSS feed items, videos, Twitter feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 customizing options)
Many widgets offer a number of settings that allow you to further customize them. This can include things like making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer configuration options!)
How To Use Widgets
As you have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your WordPress 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 detailed tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, plus lots of great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following 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 please click on links to visit 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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