There are lots of benefits to choosing the WordPress CMS platform to build, manage and grow a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure your site’s layout without programming skills.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme you use) using widgets.
(WordPress widgets)
This post explains what widgets are, why they are ideal for non-technical users and how widgets can help you add functionality to your website.
WordPress Widget: A Basic Guide To WordPress Widgets For Business Owners
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small module of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a feature, or a text box or menu 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 need to know how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too technical. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-technical users.
WP widgets help you control technical features and functions on your site without requiring knowledge of coding.
(WordPress widgets help you manage many features and functions on your site without having to touch code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way to allow WordPress users to control aspects of their website’s layout and functionality.
In simple terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and remove content sections to parts of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying 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 features you can add to your WP site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using WordPress widgets:
- page lists
- categories
- archives
- menus that display only selected pages
- links to resources
- your most read posts
- excerpts of recent comments added to your posts
- clickable ad banners
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- RSS feed content
- shopping cart forms
- video galleries
- twitter feeds
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Twitter)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add loads of new functionality to WordPress and alter the entire look and feel of your site.
As you will see shortly, themes affect where widgets display on your site and a number of plugins also add accompanying widgets that can further extend your website or blog’s usability.
Widgetized Areas
Most themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas in the theme’s layout where you can add widgets to.
Usually, you will find functions driven by widgets in the theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header area, footer, sometimes even below or above the content area.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area for the theme’s sidebar area …
(Some themes only provide one widget area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that the theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only area where users can add widgets to their site using the theme shown above is in the site’s sidebar section.
In contrast, the WP theme shown in the screenshot below includes multiple widget-enabled areas …
(Many themes offer users multiple widget-enabled areas)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget screen of the above theme, and you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple WordPress widget areas)
As you can see, in the above theme, widgets can be added to the sidebar area of two 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 WP Widgets?
The Widgets area is located inside the WordPress administration area and can easily be accessed by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This brings up the Widgets panel in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets you can use 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 made Active or Inactive using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. become active and can be used.
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 site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, you may find that new widgets display in your Widgets section as new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, rearrange and delete them all right inside your Widgets section using simple drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets on your WordPress site using drag and drop)
Use drag & drop to easily rearrange the order and layout of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this example site, the widgets have already been configured to display:
- An opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- Click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control how certain features on your site display)
Inside the example site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they were arranged in the active widget area …
If we rearrange the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag & drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
This immediately changes the order of items in your site’s sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call feature (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us banner (2) can now be found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Here are some other things about widgets that are also worth keeping in mind about:
Widget Management – Widget Customizer Section
Depending upon the WP 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 any changes to the live website.
You can do many modifications and adjustments in preview mode, like inserting, removing and reorganizing your active 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 on your site to visitors.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
Widget management is a valuable 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 errors), or change widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen discussed earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you in an earlier example, with WordPress you can quickly and easily reorganize how information is displayed in areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse button, using drag-and-drop …
(Rearrange sidebar elements with widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the above screenshot, for example, you can see that we have easily reorganized the sidebar menu 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 elements using widgets can help improve your site’s visitor 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 website’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, make unique customizations to features on page elements like opt-in forms, or just add things like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your categories, an 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 clickable images, user testimonials or surveys, RSS content, image 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 something like an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no configurable options)
Many widgets offer a number of options that allow you to further customize these. 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets give you configurable options!)
Using WordPress 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 related widget into your Active widgets area.
For useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your web site, 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 new at WordPress, you may also find the following posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you grow your business online. To learn more about using WordPress for a business website please see other posts we have published on this site.
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