What is a WordPress widget?

Dec 11, 2019 | Beginner's Guide


A WordPress widget isn’t just a fun word. It’s a powerful resource for you inside of your WordPress website. It’s a container that holds anything you need and it can appear in endless areas on your website if the theme allows for a widget to live in the space. Spaces like the footer area or the sidebar are quite common. This allows for efficient content management giving you one area to go make an edit / change and it will be reflected across that same widget area on the entire website. WOW! This is going to make your world in WordPress fun and easy. Be certain to learn about the different widget areas in the theme that you’re planning to use. Here’s a video to teach you how to use Shortcode in your sidebars / widgets.

Full Transcript

Hey, y’all! My name is Kori Ashton, and you have found a smaller video that’s a part of a larger series that I’ve done called The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide in WordPress. I hope this helps you, and if you’re interested in learning more about WordPress, I’ll put the link to the full series, 15 videos, at the end of this video, so you’ll be certain to find it and be off and running in your WordPress journey.

Let’s get to the tutorial. What is a WordPress widget? Well, first of all, it’s just a fun word, widget. It’s actually an area on your website that allows you to put content into it dynamically and have it appear across the entire area of your website. So back up for a second. One of the things that used to frustrate people is whenever you tried to make an edit to a website, you realized that you have content in one area, and you make that change, but maybe that content also lives on a lot of other pages.

So what you don’t wanna do is go in and have to make changes on all those other pages. What you want to do is be more efficient with your editing. You wanna be able to go to one area and make that change and have it appear across your whole website. That’s able to be done inside of a widget box.

And a lot of authors are very generous with all their different widget areas. This particular website that I’m running, askkori.com, has widgets on this right side here, allowing me to put in an image with a link, allowing me to put in all of my content for my categories for my blog articles, adding in affiliate links right here as well. You get to see all of this living here. All of this is built-in here with widget boxes. I can go to one area inside of my dashboard, make one change, and no matter what page this lives on, that change will be published.

I’ve got all sorts of other videos that’ll help you understand widgets and how to use them effectively. I’ll put that in the description box below. Hey, if you guys liked this video, please be sure to give it a thumbs-up, like it, leave a comment, subscribe to the channel even because every Wednesday, I’m creating content just like this to help you improve your online marketing inside the world of WordPress.

All things considered, search engine optimization, social media marketing, what is great design, security issues, all sorts of things are covered in over 400 videos on askkori.com, so please be sure to check that out as well. You can give me a tweet if you have your own questions. I would love to make a video just for you. All right, enjoy your WordPress journey. You can totally do this. All right, bye, you guys!