Basic WordPress training: Getting to know the WordPress dashboard
By the end of this lesson, you’ll be confident with all of the major functions of the WordPress dashboard and be able to customise it to meet your own specific needs.
But first, you need to log in!
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Logging in to WordPress
When you installed WordPress you created a username and password. Navigate to YourSiteName.com/wp-admin/ and you’ll see the screen below.
Enter your username and password and click ‘Log in’.
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To make life easy, you can check the box marked ‘Remember me’; this means you won’t have to type in your username and password every time you want to log in.
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What is the WordPress dashboard?
You’ll then be greeted with your Dashboard; It should look something like this.
Dashboard is just the WordPress name for what other services call the Control Panel’.
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The Dashboard is basically the nerve centre for your website’s back-end (the back-end is the part of the website that visitors DON’T see and dictates what appears on the front-end of your site, which is the part that visitors DO see).
From the Dashboard, you’ll be able to navigate to any page in your Admin area and perform all the functions necessary to update and maintain your site.
At first glance, the Dashboard can appear a little overwhelming; there’s a lot of information. In fact it’s a very simple, user-friendly interface, but takes a little bit of getting used to.
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Walking through the dashboard
The information in the main-part of the page is divided into blocks. The first block you’ll see is Welcome.
The Welcome block provides a list of quick-start options for tasks you might like to perform straight away.
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Say, for example, you didn’t want visitors to have the ability to comment on your blog posts (although I think this would be a mistake), you have the option to turn off comments right from the Welcome block.
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Scroll down and look to the left and you’ll see At a Glance.
This is basically a snapshot of everything that currently exists on your WordPress site. It tells you how many pages and posts are on your site (we’ll talk about the difference between pages and posts a little later on), how many comments have been left by visitors to your blog, which theme is active on your site, and what version of WordPress is installed.
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Below that is the Activity block.
This shows the most recent activity on your site, such as your most recently published blog posts and the most recent comments left on your blog. This is a quick way to moderate comments left by visitors; from here, you can approve a comment, mark it is a Spam or remove it by placing it in the Trash.
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Over to the right is the Quick Draft block.
This is a way to get your latest blog post ideas down really quickly as soon as you log in, without having to go through the process of adding a new post. Think of it as a notepad. When you type in information here and click Save Draft, WordPress will save it as a blog post but it won’t be published yet – it will be saved as a draft, meaning that visitors to your site won’t be able to see it yet.
Moving down the page, the blocks start to become a little less essential.
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The WordPress News covers latest developments in the WordPress world and is probably not of great interest to a beginner.
The Latest from WPBeginner may prove more useful; it’s a list of the latest blog posts and tutorials from WPBeginner.com; a site specifically designed for people like you, learning their way around WordPress.
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Be aware that what you see on the Dashboard page can be effected by changes you may make later on down the line. If you install a particular plug-in (more about those later), you may see a new block related to that plug-in on the Dashboard.
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Customising the Dashboard
The Dashboard is highly customisable, meaning you can swap the position of blocks and get rid of them altogether if needs be.
Say for example you wanted easier access to the WordPress News block by moving it to the top of the page. Simply hover over the title of the block until you see the four-way cursor, then drag the block to its new position – easy!
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If you want to get rid of a certain block in your Dashboard, all you need to do is click on ‘Screen Options’ in the top right-hand corner and uncheck any blocks you don’t want to see when you log in.
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Great – now you have a clear understanding of the WordPress Dashboard.
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