There are many benefits to choosing the WordPress web publishing software for building and managing a website or blog. One of these is that you can easily add content, enhance your site and rearrange the layout of your website without coding skills.
WordPress gives you the ability to quickly and easily add, remove, and manage various types of content in your site’s sidebar menu (and header and footer sections, depending on what theme is installed on your site) using widgets.
(Widgets)
This article explains how WordPress widgets work, what they do and how widgets can help you to supercharge your web site.
About WordPress Widgets: An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For Newbies
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easy!)
A widget is a small block of code that performs a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your WP site.
The WordPress software 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 need to learn how to program web code.
Now … don’t worry if the above sounds too geeky. As will soon learn, widgets are made for non-techies.
With widgets, you don’t need to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to enhance your site.
(Widgets help you control specific features and functions on your site without the need to touch code!)
Widgets were originally designed to provide an easy way of allowing WordPress users to manage aspects of their site’s layout and functionality.
Simply put, widgets let you do things like:
- Easily insert, edit and delete functions in 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 functionality you can add to your site’s sidebar section (and headers and footers and other areas, depending on your theme) using WP widgets:
- list of pages
- content categories
- post archives
- custom page menus
- links to external sites
- most popular posts
- user comments
- clickable images
- testimonials
- poll questions & results
- content from RSS feeds
- newsletter registration form
- images
- social media sharing buttons
- add widgets from external sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other articles, we provide detailed information about plugins and themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes can add loads of new functionality to WordPress and even drastically alter the entire look and feel of your website.
As you will see shortly, WP themes affect where widgets display on your web site and some plugins also install accompanying widgets that can extend your website or blog’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Areas
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widgetized sections in the theme’s layout where widgets can show.
Usually, this is going to be in your theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, these can also be found in the header area, the footer area, 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 theme in the screenshot below has only one widget area adding features to the theme’s sidebar navigation …
(Some WordPress themes only provide a single widget enabled section)
Here is the widget section of the theme shown above, and you can see that the theme only includes one widgetized area …
As you can see from the above, the only place where users can add widgets to their website using the above theme is in the site’s sidebar area.
In contrast, the theme shown in the screenshot below contains multiple widget-ready areas …
(Many themes offer users a number of widget-ready areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, where you can see how many widget areas this specific theme includes …
(Multiple widgets areas)
As you can see, in 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 themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer area)
Where Do I Access My WP Widgets?
The Widgets section is located inside the WP dashboard by going to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets screen in your web browser …
(Widgets Screen)
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 using drag-and-drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. instantly become available for use.
In addition, the Widgets screen includes an Inactive Widgets section that lets you remove widgets that you no longer want actively displayed on your site. Inactive widgets do not lose 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 your default WordPress theme and display items like Search, Archives, Meta, etc. to visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with several pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, when new WP plugins are installed on your website or blog, you will see that new widgets are also added to your Widgets section …
(Installing WordPress plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets area!)
Widgets Features: Drag And Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and delete them all inside your Widgets section just by using drag and drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag and drop)
Drag and drop lets you easily reconfigure the layout and order of your website’s widgetized 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 banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site appear)
Looking inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in the same order as they have been arranged in their active widget section …
If we rearrange the order these widgets in the Sidebar Widget Area using drag & drop …
(Drag and drop to rearrange widgets in your widget area)
The widget features have now been reordered in the sidebar …
As you can see, this instantly changes the order of items in your 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 image button (2) now sits above the newsletter opt-in form (1) …
(Widgets are really easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
There are some other things about using widgets that are also worth knowing about:
Widget Management – Previewing Widgets
Depending upon the theme that you have installed on your site, you can also manage and customize your 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 edits and adjustments to your widgets in preview mode, like inserting, deleting and moving around the currently added widgets to any widget areas that your theme makes available, and it’s all done 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.
(Widget management – work in preview mode or configure widgets on the fly!)
The ability to manage widgets from 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 (to avoid making errors), or change your widgets on the fly using the Widget editor area shown previously.
Widget Configuration
As we have shown you earlier, WordPress lets you completely reorganize how content displays in widgetized areas of your site sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop technology …
(Reorganize sidebar elements using widgets to improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have quickly and easily redesigned the site’s 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.
Reorganize sidebar layout with widgets to 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 static websites, you would need to edit code in the web templates to reorganize the order of elements, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a list of your web pages, or a dropdown menu of your post categories, an archive section, customized menus, links to external sites, a list of your most read posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying text ads, quotations or poll questions & results, RSS content excerpts, video galleries, Facebook feeds, and more.
While some widgets are “fixed” in the sense that they provide little to no customizing 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 customizing options)
Many widgets provide additional settings that allow you to further customize them. This includes making certain types of information hidden to your site visitors but visible to registered users, displaying additional forms, fields, or data, specifying sizes of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Most widgets offer customization!)
Using Widgets
As we have seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WordPress web 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 great step-by-step tutorials showing you how to use different widgets in WordPress to boost the effectiveness of your website, plus many great 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 WordPress newbie, 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 the benefits of using WordPress for a business website or blog please see other posts we have published on this site.
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