How to navigate the WordPress Admin Dashboard

In our last post, we spoke about How to Install WordPress in your computer.

Now that WordPress is installed, let’s navigate the Admin Dashboard.

The WordPress admin dashboard, often called WP Admin or WP admin panel, is essentially the control panel for your entire WordPress website. It’s where you create and manage content, add functionality in the form of plugins, change styling in the form of themes, and lots, lots more.

How Do You Access The WordPress Admin Dashboard?

By default, you can always find the WordPress admin dashboard by appending /wp-admin to the URL of your WordPress website. Most of the time, that means you can find the WordPress admin at:

https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin

How Do You Log Into Your WordPress Admin Area?

If you’re not already logged in and you try to access your admin dashboard by appending /wp-admin, WordPress will automatically redirect you to the WordPress admin login page without any further action required on your part. But you can also always manually go straight to the WordPress admin login page URL by visiting:

https://yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

How Do You Use The WordPress Admin Area?

When you first sign into the WordPress admin dashboard, you’ll see the default screen with widgets such as activity, quick draft, Stats, WordPress events and news, and at a glance. This screen gives you a quick overview of all the details for your WordPress website.

But while the dashboard page is good for a quick overview, you’ll spend most of your time in other areas of the WordPress admin dashboard.

To access those areas, you can use the various menu options in the sidebar. WordPress includes a number of options by default, but many themes and plugins add additional menu items (so you might see something slightly different on your own WordPress site):

Creating A New Blog Post With The WordPress Admin Panel

Let’s say you want to write your first blog post using WordPress. Here’s how the WordPress admin area helps you do that:

First, you’d hover over the Posts menu item to reveal a set of submenu items. Then, you’d click on the Add New button:

This opens up the Add New Post screen where you can enter a title, write your blog post in the text editor, upload images, assign categories, and more.

Media, pages, comments

The dashboard gives us access to the media we showcase in our blog post or the pages. This refers mostly to images, but it also applies to videos, audio, documents, spreadsheets, and others.

Pages: In the same way we can add posts, we can add pages. The process is basically the same. In a future post, I will talk about the difference between blog posts and pages.

Comments: When you write a blog post and some one makes a comment, you can moderate that comment. You can decide to accept it or delete it. Unfortunately, there are many spammers who use the comment box to spread their propaganda. The comment tab, allows you to block all of them.

Managing How Your Website Looks With The WordPress Admin Area

Another thing that the WordPress admin area lets you do is modify how your WordPress site looks by choosing and customizing themes, widgets, menus, background, and more.

Plugins, Settings, Users, Comments, And Lots More

By exploring the other menu and submenu items of the WordPress admin panel, you can control pretty much every aspect of your WordPress site, from settings to users, plugins, comments, and most everything else.

Can You Change How The WordPress Admin Panels Looks And Functions?

Yes! There are a number of methods that you can employ to change how the WordPress admin panel looks and functions. We’ll go through a couple of the most common:

Hiding Admin Panel Elements That You Don’t Use

If there are some elements that you don’t use, WordPress lets you hide them to simplify your workflow. To do it, click on the Screen Options button in the top-right corner of any WordPress admin page.

Then, uncheck the boxes for the items that you no longer wish to see.

Previous Web Design posts

• How to install a WordPress website on your computer
• How to find hosting for your website
• WordPress.com or WordPres.org, which one should you use?