Every Joe in the world once said that WordPress Dashboard is easy. But, is it?
With 64 million websites under its reign, WordPress continues to dominate the CMS landscape-seizing 62.8% market share. That’s the end of the good news.
Nearly 30% of WordPress sites are slow-performing due to plugin bloat, incompatible themes, poor management, and a rushed approach to setting up a site.
Mastering WordPress Dashboard- your key to the WordPress management kingdom- resembles the Super Mushroom in Mario; boosting their power and helping them to navigate the WordPress management challenges.
However, navigating to the WordPress dashboard seems like a maze. No worries though. We’ll spill the beans on how to tame WordPress for agencies.
A Quick Overview of WordPress Dashboard
WordPress Dashboard is the control unit that enables you to customize, update, and optimize your WordPress site. It’s the first screen you see as you log in to your WordPress site.
The WordPress dashboard has multiple sections, each highlighting different aspects of your website. For instance:
- At a Glance section provides insights on several posts, pages, and comments on the site
- Posts allow you to create new posts, edit existing posts, and manage the core of each content
- Media is the library of images, videos, and other media files
- Pages provide details about the type of pages your website has
- Appearance to control themes, menus, and widgets
- Plugins to install new plugins or manage the existing ones
- Settings grant access to the core sites of the site
You can think of the WordPress dashboard as the magic wand that grants agencies the power to control their clients’ websites. To see the magic happen, agencies must know how to use the wand correctly.
How Mastering the Dashboard Benefits Agencies
Gaining a comprehensive understanding of WordPress dashboards might seem overwhelming but pays off well as agencies can tap into a wealth of benefits.
- Once agencies learn how to tame WordPress dashboards, they can quickly create, edit, and update content for their clients’ sites, translating into quicker turnaround. Additionally, they can update and manage themes/plugins without any manual coding, saving hours of management site per site.
- WordPress Dashboard is designed in a way that agencies don’t have to rely on developers to manage content, media, and site settings, reducing operational expenses.
- Agencies can handle client sites from a single dashboard, reducing the infrastructure or the need for complex multi-site management systems.
- Agencies can manage the users, control the access, and define the role of each user from the Dashboard, ensuring the safety of client sites. By keeping client sites secure and optimized via the dashboard, agencies build trust, improving client retention and reducing the risk of reputational damage from security breaches or performance issues.
- To cut things short, having a great understanding of the WordPress dashboard means doing more than expected, meeting deadlines, and optimizing the resources.
Getting Started – Creating a WordPress Staging Site
Ready to take the first step toward mastering the WordPress Dashboard? Don’t worry—this won’t be another dull, generic WordPress guide that leaves you scratching your head.
We’re here to make it exciting, practical, and action-packed by using a staging site and explaining all the WordPress dashboard components.
InstaWP is our go-to tool to create staging sites as it makes everything a child’s play with. No coding is required; just tons of powerful features at your fingertips.
- Step 1: Sign up or log in to InstaWP.
- Step 2: Once you’re logged in, go to Dashboard>Create New to generate a new environment.
- Step 3: You have the freedom to build the staging sites from scratch, using pre-build templates, from the store, or with the help of AI. Such customization to create staging resembles a rare gem.
Select all the parameters and click on ‘Next Step’ to finish the staging set-up. In a fraction of a second, you’ll have a fully customized staging site at your disposal.
- Step 4: Use ‘Magic Login’ to gain one-click access to the WordPress dashboard of the staging site.
Guide to Refer: How to Create a WordPress Staging Environment in the Cloud
WordPress Dashboard Basics
We have said it before and will say it again; WordPress dashboard is the control center of your website. It’s where every action happens. So, understanding its key components is crucial.
Let’s take a stroll through the main sections of the dashboard.
WordPress for agencies allows you to manage the website’s content, payout, and functionalities through its three components.
- Toolbar– Located at the top of the screen, the toolbar section provides instant access to crucial tools and information. Here, you will receive notifications, have shortcuts to frequently used actions, and access your profile.
- Sidebar Menu: The left side of the dashboard is the sidebar menu, featuring sections such as pages, posts, appearance, plugins, and settings.
You can customize the dashboard’s layout by a simple click and drop of the widget’s title and place it at a desired location.
You can also choose which widget should be displayed at the dashboard using the ‘Screen’ option, located at the top right side of the page.
Essential Dashboard Features for Agencies
Agencies, handling multiple sites simultaneously, need to gain a deeper understanding of essential dashboard features, including Posts, Pages, Media, and so on. These core features help them to streamline content management.
Let’s take a deep dive into these.
Posts: The Core of Content
On the left side of the dashboard, you will see the ‘Posts’ sections- the command center for creating, editing, and managing your website’s content. From blog to long-form content, any writing content that fuels your website is crafted and managed from here.
Key Features of Post
In this section, you have multiple functionalities such as:
- Add New: Create new posts.
- Categories: Add a category to your content
- Tags: Add tags to your content
WordPress offers a block-based editor to manage different parts of the content and customize it fully. You can add a heading, paragraph, table, list, and other components to the content.
Pages: Manage Static Content
‘Pages’ is where all the static content- content that is rarely updated/modified- is listed for your ease. You can edit and delete pages such as Home Page, About Us Page, or Content Page.
Unlike the ‘Page’ section, ‘Pages’ doesn’t have categories, tags, and publishing date details. However, you can manage the pages as per the “parent-child” hierarchy system.
Comments: Review Readers’ Views
In the ‘Comments’ section, you’ll find a list of comments received on your website. You can not only view the comments but also delete, archive, unapproved, and approve them in bulk, saving you a great deal of time & effort.
Media Management and File Handling
To manage all the visual aspects of your site, you have a dedicated ‘Media’ section. It stores all your media files, such as images, videos, and audio. You can upload, manage, and organize your uploaded files. You can upload the desired media files, sizes up to 256 MB, for future use.
You can do basic editing such as image cropping, resizing, and rotating based on your blog/articles’ requirements. You can even add alt text, captions, and descriptions to the media files and optimize them for SEO, resulting in better visibility.
Navigating to the ‘Media’ section is easy; just click on ‘Add New File’ and you’re good to go. By providing you with a centralized storage for all your media files, it makes content creation a lot easier.
Setting Up and Managing User Roles
For anyone willing to keep the site protected, understanding the ‘Users’ section is crucial. In this tab, you can see all the registered users, add new users, and edit the complete profile.
- All Users: This provides a quick overview of all the listed users and their roles. By default, WordPress offers six user roles– subscribers, authors, editors, contributors, administrators, and super admins. You can set or change the role as per the access you want to grant to each user.
- Add New User– This section allows you to add a new user account. You have multiple parameters such as user name, email ID, password, user roles, and so on to define. You can also choose to send or not to send the notification to the new user.
- Profile- This section is for personalization of your account. You can set the default language, edit name/nickname, add contact information, and other aspects without any hassles.
Advanced Techniques and Tools
For agencies, efficiency is crucial to maintaining thousands of pages of hundreds of clients’ websites. This is why they must gain mastery over some advanced techniques and tools such as customizers, plugins, and themes.
Using the Customizer for Design Adjustments
Every brand has a unique voice, and agencies must ensure that their websites reflect this identity. Customizer or Editor is what makes it happen. It lets you effortlessly edit the site’s appearance to make it more fitting. It’s the controlling unit for your website’s layout.
- Navigation lets you create or edit the navigation menus of the website.
- Styles is where you can style the color palettes and typographies for the website.
- Pages enable you to quickly browse the desired website pages and edit.
- Templates are for creating new page templates or editing the existing ones.
- Patterns store a variety of templates that you can use to design multiple purposes such as designing hero images or gallery layouts.
Plugins: The Powerhouse of the Website
Plugins make WordPress development a downhill ride by allowing you to add desired functionalities to the website without any coding hassles. WordPress has an astronomical collection of pre-made plugins that you can use to empower your website.
You can manage the existing plugins or install new plugins from this section.
To add a new plugin, click on ‘ Add New Plugin’. Use the search bar to access the plugin of your choice and install it instantly.
Pro Tip: Want to avoid the havoc created by an incompatible plugin? Use staging of InstaWP and review the desired plugin’s functionalities extensively and save one hour per day.
Themes: Take Control of The Site’s Appearance
In the ‘Appearance’ section, you have two tools- Themes and Editor- to manage the appearance of your website.
The ‘Themes’ section gives you instant access to the extensive WordPress theme repository. You can choose a theme that resonates with your brand voice. Just simply click on ‘Add New Theme’.
Bonus Read: How to Resolve WordPress Theme Conflicts and Errors Like a Pro
Optimizing Your Workflow
That was how the WordPress dashboard works. But, it’s not the end. Agencies must optimize the workflow to meet tight deadlines and boost customer satisfaction. Gladly, there is a way out.
To avoid getting lost in the labyrinth of features and functionalities of the dashboard, agencies must group similar tools or functions to increase the reach and save time.
For instance, if you manage e-commerce sites then tools related to sales, marketing, and customer acquisitions should be listed under one section whereas the order fulfillment tools like inventory & pricing should be clubbed.
Creating shortcuts for all these key functionalities is also a great move to make to increase the team’s efficiency as they provide quick insights without switching to multiple tabs.
Automating key actions such as scheduled content posting, taking the site’s data back up, and auto-updating the plugins will reduce the manual efforts for agencies.
Guide to Refer: How to enable auto updates in WordPress for Core, Plugins, and Themes
Conclusion
WordPress dashboard may seem overwhelming at first. But, once you have basics in place, it acts like a way up to the success scale and boosts revenue generation for agencies.
Knowing how to manage, test, and update clients’ posts, themes, plugins, and other components will agencies to reach new highs. Throughout their journey of WordPress management, InstaWP remains the most dependable partner.
Sign up today to see how it can help agencies save thousands of work hours per project and increase revenue.