Review of the WordPress Dashboard

When you login to your WordPress site, you will be redirected to the WordPress Dashboard. This is the place through where you can create new posts, pages, upload media and, if your user has permissions, update the settings of your site.

This is how the WordPress Dashboard looks like for WordPress version 6.1.1

On the left we have the Dashboard Menu and the main view is where the content is listed from each page you click on the menu.

WordPress Dashboard Menu

The Dashboard menu has links to different pages that are part of the WordPress Core. New menu links can be added by some plugins or by adding custom code into the theme. I will explain this in details in another post.

The links shown in this menu depends your user’s assigned role. Administrator sees all the links, but lower roles like author, editor, will see less links.

Dashboard Page

The Dashboard page gives some info on the WordPress site. It has some default widgets that can help you to quickly do some action or view health status and upcoming WordPress related events.

Posts / Pages Page

The Posts page is where you can see all posts you have written and add new ones by clicking on the Add New button. You can also add categories and tags

Media Page

On this page you can view and upload new media files.

Comments Page

On the Comments page you can view comments added on the posts / pages on your site, if you allow for comments. You can approve or reject the comments. By default the comments will be in pending status and won’t show on the page where the comment was added. It will show there only if you approve the comment. The behaviour can be changed through Settings -> Discussion.

Appearance Page

Here you can add view the installed themes on your site and can add new or change the active theme. Depending on the theme you can also Edit the theme via the Editor or Customiser. Again this depends if you have block theme installed or the traditional theme. Block themes are new type of themes that we will discuss more in another post. The 2023 theme that comes with WordPress is a block theme.

Plugins Page

Here you can install new plugins, also know as addons, for WordPress. These plugins adds some new functionality for your WordPress site. There are lot of different plugins on the WordPress Repo. This is a big topic and I will write separate post explaining what Plugins are and review of few plugins that we will install.

Users Page

On this page in the WordPress Dashboard menu, you can view all users added / registered on your site and you can also add new user.

Tools Page

On the Tools Page you have a list of tools available that you can use. You have import, export, site health tools. Also here you can export or erase personal data. I will talk more about these tools in another post.

Settings Page

This is an administrative page and by default on Administrator role has access to this page. This shows the settings for your site which you can modify. You can change the site name, tagline, change the timezone or site language and a lot of other settings.

This was a short description of the WordPress Admin Dashboard and what the default pages are. I will explain some of the pages in more details in another posts. You can follow me on Social Media and look for any new articles.