WordPress Tutorial Beginners (2021) Complete Dashboard RoadMap (Quick Guide)-
There are many tutorials of WordPress. From the first version to WordPress 5.5 3 to many more. The current version is 5.8.2. Here, goes the tutorial for WordPress dashboard 5.8.2.
Many new WordPress users want quick instruction to help them understand the dashboard’s many parts.
Also, because various settings can activate and deactivate different functions on your website, it’s a good idea to go through WordPress dashboard lessons.
So let’s get right to it.
The easiest way to access your WordPress dashboard login page without opening a hosting account and CPanel is “https://sitename.com/wp-admin“.
This URL will save you a lot of time.
It will allow you to access your WordPress Dashboard without logging into your hosting account.
Once you log in to your WordPress account, you will see the WordPress Dashboard, part of the WordPress menu.
WordPress Menu – WordPress Tutorial Beginners
The leftmost sidebar of your tab shows you the WordPress menu. It consists of-
1. Dashboard
WordPress Dashboard helps you manage your site by tweaking different settings provided in it.
You can also consider it as the WordPress backend of your website.
Here, you can see a “Welcome to WordPress” section that exposes you to a few currently available features in wordpress.
The other boxes consist of-
- Site Health Status
It provides you with a “Good” “Bad” score of your site and some suggestions for areas for development.
- At A Glance
It displays the number of articles, pages, comments, your site’s theme, and so forth.
- Activity
It displays your site’s most recent activity.
- Quick Draft
Here, you can easily add anything and quickly save it as a draft.
This draft will then be saved in your dashboard’s Posts -> All Posts tab. And at the same time, it will be visible beneath the same Quick draft box.
- WordPress Events and News
Displays all WordPress-related Events and News.
How To Customize Dashboard Screen? – WordPress Tutorial Beginners.
You can customise your dashboard tab by clicking on the “Screen Option” button. The button at the top-right corner of your screen.
Using the checkboxes, you can enable/disable screen elements.
2. Posts
Post is where you create new posts, categories, tags and keep track of all your postings.
- All Posts
All posts show all of your blog posts. These blog entries and articles can be published, kept as a draft, or discarded.
When you wish to delete five or more posts, you may use the bulk action option to do it all at once.
It also has a “Filter” feature that allows you to filter your posts by different categories.
What is a category?
Consider categories to be distinct folders where you wish to keep your files properly organised.
For example, your website has a food niche.
Therefore, your categories (folders) are chicken, fish, baking, and so on, while your blog entries are chicken soup, fried chicken, fish fry, and vanilla cake recipes (files).
- Add New
The Add New button allows you to create a new blog post that you can publish or store as a draft.
- Category
The “Category” tab is where you can create new categories.
You can assign these categories to every blog post you publish.
- Tags
The Tags tab will help you create new tags. Tags in general helps to group multiple related posts.
These categories are helpful for users who wish to find related posts on the same topic.
You may be thinking, “Aren’t categories doing the same thing?“
Yes, it is kind of doing the same thing. However, tags provide a more detailed description of the content.
For example, this post may come under the tutorial category. But I will apply the tags related to “WordPress tutorial” to explain it in greater depth.
The usage of tags is entirely optional. However, I recommend you to utilise tags since they can make users spend a long time on your website.
3. Media
Media refers to the gallery which lets you store all media-related items used in your site.
These items can be an image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, archives etc.
It also gives you the option to edit your image.
Where can you edit your image? – WordPress Tutorial Beginners.
To edit your image, select a particular image click on it. Then press on the “Edit Image” button present below it.
Here, you can-
- Change the dimension to scale the image.
- You can specify the aspect ratio for your image.
- Crop your image.
- Rotate the image to the left or right.
- Flip the image to a vertical or horizontal position.
4. Pages
The Page tab will look quite similar to that of the Post tab.
You can add a New Page for your site by clicking on the “Add New” button.
Yes, you can add multiple pages such as the Home, Blog, About Us, and Contact Us page through this tab.
5. Comments
The Comment tab displays all of the comments left under your post.
You may either approve them or send them to the spam section.
Until and unless you prove any comment, it will not show on your site.
This tab will show you who wrote the comment, which post they commented on, and when he/she commented on your article.
6. Appearance
It consists of-
- Themes
It is where you can add a theme for your site. It may be Astra, Kadence, Hello, Ocean WP theme, or anything else.
Astra and Kadence are lightweight themes, which means they won’t make your site too heavy, slowing down the loading performance.
Want to what affect you site’s speed? Checkout 11 Points Affecting Page Speed of Website post.
- Customize
Here, you can change the theme colour, button style and colour, blog post, page layout, and many other things.
Remember, the availability of various areas of modification is dependent on the theme you have installed.
This means your theme may not allow you to modify your theme colour or the layout of a page.
Therefore, conduct thorough research on it before selecting a suitable theme for your website.
- Widgets
Widgets allow you to add content or features to your sidebars. For example, a form or a section with the most recent posts.
- Menus
The menu section allows you to build, update, and delete your site’s header and footer menus.
Once you create a few pages on your site, you’ll be able to see those pages as choices for adding to your site’s menu.
- Theme Editor
The “Theme Editor” contains all the codes related to your site theme.
If you are not a technical person, proceed with caution when browsing around this section of your WordPress account.
A wrong step can completely break your site.
It is also where should the analytics tracking code be placed.
7. Plugins
Plugins are software that can provide different functions to your site.
Once your site is up and running, you will begin to add more plugins to give functionality or new features to your site.
But, please, do not overload your site with plugins.
It has the potential to significantly slow down your site, therefore impacting the performance of your website.
You can set your plugins to “auto-update”. However, I would urge you not to.
Why auto-updates are not appreciated? -WordPress Tutorial Beginners
Sometimes a new update can contain bugs that can affect your site.
When I was a beginner, I almost instantly upgraded an Elementor theme builder plugin without keeping a backup of my website.
It altered the colours of my theme, made a few areas smaller, others larger and overall, it was a mess.
So, while updating your plugins, be cautious and keep a backup of your site.
8. Users – WordPress Tutorial for Beginners
Here, you can view all of your WordPress user accounts.
It will include your admin account and accounts of other persons which you have created.
How to create a New User account?
- To add a new user, click on the “Add New” button.
- Fill in the login, email, and all other needed information.
- Click the “Generate” button to create a password for the person and assign a position simultaneously.
- You may assign them the responsibilities of subscriber, contributor, author, editor, and administrator.
- Also, be sure to tick the option that says, “Send the new user an email regarding their account.”
- After completing all of the preceding procedures, click the “Add New User” button to establish a new user account.
You can also edit your user account if you wish to do so.
9. Tools
It specifies whether or not a tool is available in your account.
You can import a tool if you wish to. It can also help you to export things, such as a post, a page, media, or all of your material.
Sight Health Status provides you with tips for improving your site as well as other site-related information.
It also allows you to export and “delete” personal data.
10. Settings for WordPress Tutorial Beginners
- General – General Settings provides you option to change,
- Site title.
- Tagline of your site: For example, if you hover over wpbeginners site logo, you can see “wpbeginner- Beginner’s Guide for WordPress”. Here, “Beginner’s Guide for WordPress” is the tagline.
- WordPress account (URL): You must change your WordPress URL if you have already installed SSL on your site. Change it from http://sitename.com/ to https://sitename.com/.
- Site Address (URL): Just like WordPress URL, you must change your site URL from http://sitename.com/ to https://sitename.com/ once you have installed SSL on your site.
- Administration email address.
Membership, new user default role, site language, time zone, date format, week start on, and so on are some of the basic parameters you can alter.
Set all the preceding options and click on “Save Changes” present at the bottom of the page.
- Writings
In the “Writings” tab, you can change the default post category and default post format.
Keep the post format to standard, but feel free to experiment with different choices to see what improvements they can offer.
Provide a default category where all your posts will get automatically listed.
Leave the remaining options alone, such as mail server and other fields.
After all of this, click on the “Save Changes” button.
- Reading
Reading settings tab is quite vital for your site.
Once you have created a new home page and a blog page, change “Your homepage displays” from “Your latest posts” to “A static page (select below)“.
Then select the respective pages from the drop-down menu for “Homepage” and “Posts page”.
Note: Your homepage URL will always be “https://sitename.com/” even if you give it a slug name as home.
In a URL such as “http://stename.com/home/”, home is a slug.
Others Parts To Edit Inside Reading Settings
Blog pages show at most section will let you display the maximum number of content you wish to appear on your “Your latest posts” page. And not on any of the “Posts” pages that you will customize.
Want to know some tips on how to stand out among the crowd with online content writing? Click Writing For Online Content to learn more.
Do not change the parameters in “Syndication feeds show the most recent” section. Leave it at its default setting. You may learn more about it by clicking on the link given on the tab.
For each post in a feed determines how the browser shows your content. Therefore, keep it as “Full Text“.
But what is an excerpt?
An excerpt is a few words, typically placed below blog articles and is followed by a “read more” link.
Lastly, do not check the box for search engine visibility. Doing so will prevent search engines from indexing your site in Google.
And then click on “Save Changes”.
- Discussion Settings
The settings tabs provide you with default post settings, comment settings and other settings which you can alter as per your choice.
If you do not have a custom logo, you can set a default logo for, user’s account. You can set the “Gravatar Logo” as a default logo.
Then click “Save Changes”.
- Media
Keep the media settings as it is. The default media setting will work fine.
- Permalinks
Another area where you must make changes is the permalink.
Always change your permalink to ” Post name”. Then save changes.
It will create a proper URL such as “https://blogitbig.com/ssl-for-free/” and not some URL with numbers, month, date etc.
Conclusion – WordPress Tutorial Beginners
Always make the necessary changes in your WordPress account settings before creating any page or executing any activity on your site.
This must be the second most important thing to perform after installing your site’s SSL Certificate.
I hope this post was helpful to you. Please share your thoughts about it on the comment section below.
