What's the difference in a plugin and a widget?

Hi Rita,

Plugins and widgets are not the same thing.

Plugins add functionality to your site. A plugin might add a small feature to the admin area, for example. Or add social media sharing icons to your blog articles. Or automatically capitalize your title and heading tags. Some plugins might create a widget, but that might not necessarily be the function of a particular plugin.

Widgets, on the other hand, are small blocks of content that appear in your site's sidebar, footer, or other widget-enabled areas of your site, depending on your site's theme. On this page, you'll notice a couple of widgets in the right-hand side. Once contains a button to “Ask a Question”. Another widget lists the “Most Recent Questions”.

And in our footer at the bottom of this site, you'll notice four widgets. “Site Links” and “Products” are Custom Menu widgets that we've created. “Follow Us” contains links to our social media channels, and is powered by the Genesis Simple Share plugin. And finally, we have an email signup widget that is powered by the Genesis eNews Extended plugin.

So, as you can see, some plugins do create widgets. But not all plugins do. And some widgets are created by or powered by a plugin. But not all widgets are necessarily powered by a plugin.

The easiest way to remember the difference is that plugins add functions or features to your site. Widgets add content blocks to the front end, usually in the sidebar or footer of your site.

We cover widgets in depth in this tutorial video.

And we cover plugins in depth in this tutorial video.

Hope this helps!