There are loads of great benefits to using the WordPress CMS platform for building and managing your website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and rearrange the layout of your website with no web coding skills and knowledge required.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and rearrange various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This post explains what WP widgets are, why widgets are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to help you improve the functionality of your website.
How Do Widgets Work? A Basic Guide To Widgets For Business Owners
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
Widgets are small modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a script or menu item to your website.
WordPress is written using a web 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 program code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds like geek speak. As you are about to see, WP widgets are made for non-techie website owners.
WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your website without the need to touch code.
(WordPress widgets help you control many features and functions on your website without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of giving WordPress users to control aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and remove features in certain parts of your site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange 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 additional components you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- post categories
- archive
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- clickable images
- customer testimonials
- polls & surveys
- RSS content
- opt-in form
- product catalog images
- twitter feeds
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how these can easily add loads of new features to WordPress and even change the design of your website or blog.
As you will soon learn, WP themes affect how widgets display on your website and some plugins also add accompanying widgets that will extend your website’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where you can have widgets in.
Usually, widgets can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending on the theme, these can also be in the header, footer, sometimes even below or above the content section.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site or blog.
For example, the WP theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WordPress themes have only a single widget-ready section)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, where you can see that this specific theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the theme shown below includes a number of different widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget sections)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, with the above theme, widgets can be added 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 WP themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
How Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WP admin by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets area displays a list of all the widgets that are available.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag & drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become active and can be used on your site.
The Widgets screen 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 settings.
By default, 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, Recent Comments, Categories, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets appear in your Widgets area whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin area!)
Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WP widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them in your Widgets area just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Using drag-and-drop lets you easily reconfigure the order of your website’s widget-enabled areas.
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 banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WP plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your WordPress site)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features appear on the site in exactly the same order as their corresponding widgets have been arranged in their active widget bar …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Main Sidebar Widget Area by dragging & dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widget features have now been reordered in your sidebar …
As you can see, this immediately changes the layout of your 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 banner (2) has been moved to the spot above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Cool, huh?
Let me just show you some more things about using widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Previews
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you see before committing any changes to the live website.
You can do many edits and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from your own 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 before publishing it (to avoid making errors), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained previously, WordPress lets you easily and quickly reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized 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 layout with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have easily redesigned 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.
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 many traditionally-designed websites, you would need to edit code in the site’s templates to reorganize the layout, customize features on page elements like user registration areas, or just add things like a nested list of pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, a blog post archive section, custom page menus, links to recommended resources, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable images, customer testimonials or polls, RSS feed items, videos, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no configurable options, other than to add something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets provide users with little to no configuration options)
Most widgets provide additional options that allow you to further configure your site features. This includes making certain types of information hidden to visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets give you customizing options!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be added to your 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 different types of widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many great 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 learning how to use WordPress, you may also find the following topic-related posts useful:
- WordPress Features Explained – WordPress Plugins
- WordPress For Newbies – An Introduction To WordPress Themes
Hopefully, now you have 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 for a business web site please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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