There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing application to build, manage and grow your digital presence. One of these is that you can easily add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your site without requiring any web coding skills or knowledge.
WordPress allows you to quickly and easily insert, remove, and reconfigure various blocks of content on your blog’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can help to supercharge your website or blog.
What Do Widgets Do? Understanding WordPress Widgets For Business Users
(WordPress widgets make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are self-contained modules of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or item to your WP site.
The WordPress software is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions to a website, you have to learn how to write PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if it all sounds like geek speak. As will soon see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
Widgets help you manage technical features and functions on your website without requiring coding skills.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without having to edit code)
Widgets were originally designed to provide a simple way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget lets you do things like:
- Easily add, edit and delete functionality in certain areas of your WordPress site without touching any code, and
- Rearrange how various elements display 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 great things you can add to your site’s sidebar menu (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WordPress widgets:
- nested list of pages
- content categories
- archives
- customized menus
- links to resources
- your most popular posts
- comments
- image banners
- client testimonials
- survey results
- RSS feed items
- newsletter registration form
- video thumbnails
- social media buttons
- display widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other posts and tutorials, we write more extensively about plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and even drastically change the look and feel of your website.
As you will soon learn, WP themes can affect how widgets work on your website and some plugins include accompanying widgets that will enhance your website’s functionality.
Widgetized Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized areas on your site where widgets can show up in.
Typically, you will find functions managed by widgets in your theme’s sidebar menu, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the header, the footer, and even below or above your content.
It all depends on what theme you have installed on your site.
For example, the theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding functionality to the theme’s sidebar …
(Some themes only have one widget enabled area)
Here is an enlarged image of the widget panel of the theme above, and you can see that this specific theme only includes one widget area …
As you can see, the only place where you can add widgets to your site using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the WordPress theme shown below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many WordPress themes offer users multiple widget areas)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see how many widget areas this theme includes …
(Multiple widgets 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 3 different Footer areas (Footer Area One, Footer Area Two, Footer Area Three) …
(Some themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer)
How Can I See My WordPress Widgets?
The Widgets section is found inside your WordPress dashboard and can be accessed from the WP administration menu by choosing Appearance > Widgets …
This opens the Widgets area in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
The Widgets screen displays a list of all the widgets that can be used on your site.
On the right-hand side of the window, you can see your “active” widgets …
(Activate or deactivate widgets using drag and drop)
Available widgets can be made Active or Inactive by dragging & 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 active and can be used on your site.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your website. Inactive widgets retain their 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 the default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Categories, etc. to site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, whenever new plugins are installed on your website or blog, you may find that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
WP Widgets Features: Drag-And-Drop
WordPress widgets are great because you can easily insert, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them in your Widgets section using simple 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 site’s widget-enabled sections.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A subscription form,
- A contact support button, and
- A couple of click to phone sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features appear on your 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 the site’s active widget bar …
Let’s now reorganize these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag-and-drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widgets have now been reorganized in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly reorganizes the layout of the 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 banner (2) is now found above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other useful things about using WordPress widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon 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 see before committing your changes to your live website.
You can do several edits in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and reorganizing your current 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 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 before publishing any changes (and avoid making mistakes), or manage widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we have explained earlier, with WordPress you can easily and quickly reorder how information is displayed in widgetized areas of your website sidebars, footers and navigation menus with just a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-and-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar layout using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the layout in the sidebar by switching the search and testimonial sections. As you now know, this was easily done by simply dragging and dropping the widget elements into different positions inside the sidebar widget area.
Rearrange sidebar layout 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 most static websites, you would need to edit code in your site’s templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like subscriber forms, or just add features like an index of your site pages, or a dropdown menu of your blog post categories, an archives section, menus to display selected pages, links to external sites, links to your recent posts, the latest comments, a section displaying advertising banners, quotations or survey results, RSS content excerpts, images, social media buttons, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizable options, other than to add an optional title to the widget as shown in the example below …
(Some widgets give you little to no customizing options)
Many widgets provide a number of settings that allow you to further customize things. This includes making certain types of information hidden to site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customizing options!)
How To Use WordPress 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 related widget into your Active widgets area.
For some useful tips and tricks to using widgets, see these detailed step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use various widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website or blog, plus many cool tips on how to get 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 posts useful:
Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of issues that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about using WordPress please click on links to visit our related posts section.
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