The WordPress dashboard or the back-end of your website is the first screen after you log into your WordPress site. The WordPress Dashboard is where you start building, managing, maintaining, and optimizing your WordPress website or blog. This is where you let your creativity explode so that you can build your website or blog in a way that suits your business.
WordPress Dashboard is also considered behind the scenes that control the functionality and look of your WordPress website or blog. It is known as WordPress admin or administrative dashboard. Therefore, if you want to build an excellent WordPress site, you should familiarize yourself with and understand all the settings and components of the WordPress dashboard.
In this article, we will go over the topmost important settings and components that every WordPress site owner or webmaster should know to build an excellent WordPress site. Keep in mind that the settings described in this article are the basic and default settings in the WordPress dashboard. You can view additional settings and components in the dashboard depending on the themes or plugins you have installed and activated on your WordPress site.
Admin Bar:
This is the upper toolbar of the WordPress dashboard. It contains some of the most useful links that can also be shortcuts to accomplish some of the most important tasks. For example, you can find links to the official WordPress site, WordPress Codex documentation, support forums, visit your site, add new posts/pages/media/users, edit your profile, and log out can.
Five Widgets:
Welcome, At a Glance, Activity, Quick Drafts, and WordPress News. These are the 5 default widgets that are displayed in the prominent place of your WordPress dashboard. These widgets give you a quick overview of what’s happening on your site or blog along with some site statistics. They also provide you with some useful links to get you started with adding content, navigation, and customizing your WordPress site.
Left-Hand Main Navigation Menu:
This is the left-hand menu of the WordPress dashboard that contains items and sub-items to perform various tasks on your site. It has almost all the settings that control everything on your site. The next most important settings on our list, therefore, are the items included in this main navigation menu. To get to any of the sub-items of each item in the left-hand navigation menu, you can either click the desired item to expand its sub-item or hover over the desired item to select its sub-item. Select Flow for you.
Posts:
Posts represent the blogging aspect of your WordPress website or blog. Posts are displayed on your WordPress site in reverse chronological order with the most recent posts at the top. Posts are also called blog posts or articles. The Post item has four sub-items which are all Posts, Add New, Categories, and Tags. In the All Posts screen, there are all posts made by you or your users, whether they are published, scheduled, or saved as drafts. If you want to add a new post, you will need to use the Add New link to access the writing editor. However, you will use the Categories and Tags sub-menu to assign categories and tags to your posts.
Media:
Media is the setting of your WordPress dashboard which is responsible for uploading and storing all the media on your WordPress website or blog. The sub-items of this item are Library and Add New. You can use the Add New link to upload new media such as images, audio, and videos. On the other hand, the library is the section that stores all the uploaded media items.
Pages:
Pages represent the static content of your site. You can use them to create unchanged or rarely changed the information on your site. You can use them to create pages like about us, contact us, bios, employees, and homepages.
Comments:
The Comments administrative screen is the screen that contains all the comments made on your WordPress site. Comments represent the conversation between you and your readers. From here, you can check all authors of comments, do some reactive actions like approve/decline, reply, quick edit, edit, or go to spam or trash.
Appearance:
Appearance is one of the most important settings of the WordPress dashboard. By using the Appearance item, you can change the overall look, layout, design, and navigation of your website or blog while maintaining the necessary software (core) that operates your site. There are several sub-menus here such as Themes, Customize, Widgets, Menu, Header, and Editor.
Plugins:
The Plugins item is also one of the most important settings of the WordPress dashboard. Plugins add more functionality and capabilities to your WordPress website or blog. There are thousands of plugins out there most of them are free and you can find them on WordPress.org and some are paid or premium. By using sub-items, you can upload/install and activate plugins as well as to deactivate or deactivate and then remove them from your site.
Users:
You can use the Users item to assign users to your site. This is a useful link, especially if you have a team of employees working on your WordPress website or blog. There are 5 different user roles that have different access privileges. These 5 user roles are Administrator, Editor, Writer, Contributor, and Customer.
Settings:
The last item on our list and is an essential setting of the WordPress dashboard. The sub-items of this item are General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, and Permalinks. Keep in mind that depending on the plugins you have activated on your site, you may see additional sub-items here. You can examine each of them to see the comprehensive settings available to manage your site.
I hope this article will give you a good overview of the most important components and settings of the WordPress Dashboard.