There are lots of great benefits to using the WordPress web publishing software to build, manage and grow a website or blog. One of these is that WordPress makes it very easy to add content, expand your website’s functionality and reconfigure the layout of your website without requiring web programming skills.
WordPress lets you quickly and easily add, delete, and rearrange various types of content on your site’s sidebar menu (or header and footer sections too, depending on what theme you are using) using widgets.
(Widgets)
In this post you will learn how WordPress widgets work, why they make life easier for non-technical users and how widgets can be used to add new functionality to your web site.
Widgets – How Do They Work? An Overview Of WordPress Widgets For New Users
(WP widgets help make managing and using WordPress easier!)
Widgets are small blocks of code that perform a specific function, such as adding a form, or a script or list item to your website or blog.
WordPress is written using a scripting language called PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor). Normally, to add features and functions that will enhance the functionality of a website, you have to learn how to script PHP code.
Now … don’t worry if this sounds too geeky. As you are about to see, widgets are perfect for non-techies.
WP widgets don’t require you to know how to program code or manipulate PHP code to customize your site.
(Widgets help you manage specific features and functions on your site without the need to edit code!)
Widgets were originally developed to provide an easy way to give WordPress users to manage aspects of their WordPress theme’s layout and functionality.
In plain English terms, a widget allows you to:
- Easily insert, edit and delete features in areas of your WordPress site without having to touch any underlying code, and
- Reconfigure 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 things you can add to your WordPress site’s sidebar navigation area (plus headers and footers and other areas, depending on the theme you have installed) using widgets:
- nested page lists
- content categories
- archived blog post entries
- custom menus
- links to resources
- posts that you want to promote
- post comments
- text ads
- customer testimonials
- survey questions & results
- RSS content
- newsletter subscription form
- video galleries
- social media buttons
- add widgets from other sites (e.g. Facebook friends)
- administrative forms (e.g. login, register, etc.)
In other blog posts, we provide more detailed explanations of plugins and WordPress themes; what they are, what they do, how plugins and themes add new functionality to WordPress and alter the entire design of your website or blog.
As you will see shortly, WP themes can affect where widgets work on your website and a number of plugins include accompanying widgets that can fine-tune your site’s capabilities.
Widget-Ready Themes
Most WP themes support widgets and provide widget-enabled areas on your site where you can add widgets to.
Typically, widget-powered functions can be found in the theme’s sidebar, but depending upon the theme, widgets can also be in the site’s header section, the footer area, and even below or above the content.
It all depends on the theme that you have installed.
For example, the WordPress theme shown in the screenshot below has only one widget area displaying items in the theme’s sidebar …
(Some WP themes provide only a single widget enabled section)
Below is an enlarged image of the widget section of the theme above, and you can see that this specific WordPress theme only contains one widget-enabled area …
As you can see from the above, the only area 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 WordPress themes provide multiple widgetized areas)
Below is the widget screen of the theme above, 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, widgets can be added 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 WordPress themes let you add widgets to your site’s footer section)
Where Do I Access My Widgets?
To access the Widgets section log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Widgets …
This loads the Widgets area in your browser …
(Widgets Section)
The Widgets section displays all the widgets that are available.
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 using drag & drop.
Widgets dragged from the Available Widgets section to widget areas like your sidebar, footer, etc. immediately become activated for use 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 do not lose their pre-configured 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 in the default WordPress theme right out of the box and display items like Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Meta, etc. to your site visitors …
(By default, your site already comes with a number of pre-installed widgets)
Sometimes, new widgets display in your Widgets section when new WordPress plugins are installed on your website or blog …
(Installing new WP plugins can sometimes add new widgets to your Widgets admin section!)
Widgets Features: Drag & Drop
Widgets are great because you can easily add, activate, deactivate, reorder and remove them all right inside your Widgets area using drag & drop …
(Rearrange widgets using drag-and-drop)
Drag & drop lets you easily rearrange the layout and order of your site’s widgetized areas.
For example, take a look at the image below. In this site, the widgets have already been configured to display the following:
- A newsletter opt-in form,
- A contact support banner, and
- A couple of click to call sales buttons from a widgetized WordPress plugin …
(Widgets control the order certain features on your site display)
If you were to peek inside this site’s Widget area, you would see that these features display on the site’s sidebar menu in exactly the same order as they were arranged in their active widget bar …
Let’s now rearrange the above widgets in the Widget Area by dragging and dropping elements in the widget area …
(Drag and drop widgets in your widget area to rearrange their order)
The widgets have now been reorganized in your sidebar …
This instantly changes the layout of your sidebar. Note in the screenshot below that the click to call function (3) is now first the sidebar menu, and the contact us section (2) now sits above the newsletter subscription form (1) …
(WordPress widgets are very easy to use!)
Pretty simple, huh?
Let’s go over some other things worth keeping in mind when using widgets:
Widget Management – Preview Widgets
Depending upon the actual theme that you have installed, you can also customize widgets without making actual changes to your site, so you can be sure that you like what you have done before committing your changes to the live website.
You can do several modifications and adjustments to widgets in preview mode, like adding, 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 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 you’ve made (to avoid making mistakes), or configure widgets on the fly using the Widget editor screen as shown earlier.
Widget Configuration
As we’ve explained earlier, WordPress lets you easily reorganize how content is displayed in widgetized areas like your site’s sidebars, footers and navigation menus with only a few clicks of your mouse, using drag-&-drop …
(Reorganizing sidebar elements with widgets can help improve visitor experience)
In the screenshot above, for example, you can see that we have reorganized the sidebar area by switching around 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.
Rearranging sidebar layout with widgets can improve 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 your web templates to rearrange the layout, customize features on page elements like newsletter subscription forms, or just add features like a page index, or a dropdown menu of your site categories, an archive section, custom menus, links to external sites, a list of your most popular posts, the latest excerpts of comments added to your posts, a section displaying clickable ad banners, quotations or survey results, content from RSS feeds, video 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 provide users with little to no customization)
Most widgets offer additional settings 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 dimensions of sidebar images, videos, etc. and more …
(Many widgets provide users with customization!)
How To Use WP Widgets
As we have just seen, widgets require no coding experience or programming expertise to use. Most widgets can be easily added to your WP website or blog 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 tutorials showing you how to use a number of different widgets in WordPress to improve the effectiveness of your website, plus many useful tips on how to get the most benefit out of WordPress with 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 related posts useful:
Hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of problems that can affect your web site and how WordPress can help you get better results online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please click on links to visit other posts we have published on this site.
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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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