CONGRATULATIONS! You have made it this far. Your WordPress.org site, hosted by BlueHost, is about to get really excited. You probably are feeling OVERWHELM. That’s ok. Here is the beginner guide to all the tabs within the WordPress Dashboard to help you started. Let me show you around.
Dashboard
The WordPress Dashboard comes with a default navigation menu shown in the left sidebar. This navigation menu is also the main menu of WordPress. There are two sub-menus “Home” & “Updates”.
The “Home” is for coming back to the main WordPress dashboard anytime from inside any menu. The “Updates” section is there to notify you about any new software updates released for WordPress Core, or Themes, or plugins.
Posts
This is where you can create a new Blog Post. There are four sub-menus:
- “All Post“: you will see all of the articles you have posted and also allows you to create new posts
- “Add new“: you can create a new post instantly
- “Categories“: This is important because it allows you to categorize your posts, create or delete categories.
- “Tags“: Create tag to help reader search your contents easier.
Media
You can browse through your Media library, as well as edit and update the files. There are two sub menus:
- “Library”: all of your image & video uploads would be stored here.
- “Add New”: provide you a mechanism to quickly upload new images or videos.
Pages
WordPress Pages are static pages such as “About Me“, “Contact Us” that you can publish. Pages are different from Post. the pages can’t have any category or tag assigned to it.
Comments
If anyone make a comments on your blog, or pages, you can manage it here: do moderation, deletion, or reply to user comments, …
Appearance
This is where you make customization to your themes, place custom widgets to themes widget space, Menus, set background image, header image, and even you can edit source files of themes.
There are nine sub menus:
- “Theme“: Your blog needs a theme. You can manage your current theme or add new theme here.
- “Customize“: This is a powerful button because you can customize everything from Site Identity, Menus, Widgets, … Please be careful.
- “Widgets“: Widget Areas are global parts in your site’s layout that can accept blocks. These vary by theme, but are typically parts like your Sidebar or Footer.
- “Menus“: Menu helps your reader navigate. This is where you can manage Header or Footer menus
- “Additional CSS“: Additional CSS can be added from the Customizer. Enable the enhanced Custom CSS feature below to add additional features.
- “Premium Themes“: new and expensive theme can be purchased here. Don’t spend the money that you don’t have. TURN BACK
- “Theme File Editor“: if you are an idiot like I am who know nothing about coding, let’s stay away from this section.
Plugins
Plugins are like “apps” for your WordPress site. you can install new plugin either from WordPress.org’s plugins directory or can upload your own custom plugin. You can also fully manage those plugins, such as enabling, disabling, uninstalling, or can change plugin specific settings.
Tools
This is essentially the “utilities” area of WordPress – it allows you to import and export various data as well as other site features. Though not much used, this section lists some tools to import and export WordPress settings, posts, pages etc. Import tools are useful if you want to migrate to WordPress from any other hosted CMS like Blogger.com, Blogroll.com, or want to restore your site from static WordPress backup files etc. The Export tab is used to export WordPress, posts, pages, settings etc and save them as local files.
I recommend using some powerful backup plugins instead.
Settings
This section mainly contains the “global settings” for your site. This area contains things such as your site title, url and other important settings. All settings are DEFAULTS so make sure you know what you want to change before doing it.
I hope that you have enjoyed the WordPress dashboard tutorial.
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