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WordPress Dashboard & Settings Page | WordPress 101

WordPress dashboard is an important page for the website administrators. In this article of the WordPress 101 series, we will learn to read and customize the WordPress dashboard.

If you do not know to set up WordPress, we have written a detailed guide on how to install WordPress – Step By Step. Do check it out.

WordPress Dashboard

WordPress dashboard is the homepage for website administrators. This is where all the important site information is available such as the number of posts, pages, comments, pending comments, errors, and site health, and so on.

WordPress Dashboard
Dashboard ‹ Example website — WordPress

The above screenshot is the basic WordPress dashboard. This is how it looks when you install WordPress. But if admin does not like to see a certain widget, it can be also be disabled.

Just click the button ‘Screen options’ and it’ll drag-in the options to show or hide dashboard widgets. For example, one can hide the Welcome widget after reading it.

WordPress custom dashboard
WordPress custom dashboard

WordPress dashboard does not remain the same. As you install more and more plugins in the future, some of the plugins may also add their own widgets to the dashboard.

WordPress Settings

After walking through the WordPress dashboard, the second section in WordPress that’s important to get familiar with is WordPress Settings.

General Settings

Click ‘Settings’ in the sidebar and it’ll open the following ‘General Settings’ page. Changing any general setting impact the entire website so be careful when chaning any one of these settings.

All settings here are pretty streight forward. Here you can change the site title, tagline, WordPress URL, Site address, activate/deactivate membership, default role for new users, site language, timezone, date format and time format.

Be careful while altering WordPress Address or site address as it may break your website.

WordPress General Settings
WordPress General Settings

Writing Settings

Writing settings allows setting the default post category for new posts. By default, it is set to Uncategorized. One can create new settings and set it to default using this setting.

WordPress support multiple post formats including formats for Video, Audio, Image, Link, Status, etc. The default post format lets users set a default post format for new posts.

Writing Settings
WordPress Writing Settings

WordPress also allows users to post to their site through emails. Just send an email and it’ll be published to the website. Make sure never disclose this email to anyone as any email received at this email willl be published on the site.

To set up post through email, in the Writing Settings, enter the mail server, login name, and password.

Reading Settings

From reading settings, one can set up homepage, number of blog posts and feeds to show, and discourage search engines from indexing this site.

One can show latest blog posts or set a separate page for homepage.

Reading Settings
WordPress Reading Settings

If you are not getting any visitor from search engines even after having a lot of content on your website, make sure you have disabled the ‘Search engine visibility’ option on the reading settings page.

Discussion Settings

Discussion settings let you customize comment functionality on your blog post. This is where one can enable or disable comments on post or automatically disable comments after a number of days. This section is also pretty straight forward and does not require extra knowledge to understand it.

If you wish to use any third-party discussion system such as Disqus, then you can leave it as it is. Once you set up a third-party system, it’ll disable the default WordPress commenting system.

Discussion Settings
WordPress Discussion Settings

Media Settings

Media settings lets you define the size of Thumbnail, medium and large images. Most premium themes will manage their thumbnails in their own way. So don’t change these settings if you are using a premium theme.

WordPress Media Settings
WordPress Media Settings

Permalink Settings

Permalink is probably the second most important setting in WordPress. This is where you can set how WordPress should form posts, categories, and tags URLs. I recommend setting ‘Post name’ as the default permalink format to form a clean and SEO-friendly URL.

WordPress Permalink Settings
WordPress Permalink Settings

Privacy Settings

Last but not least is the Privacy settings. Here one can set up the site’s privacy policy page. By default, WordPress creates a Privacy Policy page and it can be set up to be visible at /privacy-policy. Or one can create a new page and set it as the privacy policy page.

WordPress Privacy Settings
WordPress Privacy Settings

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