Understanding how to customize the WordPress settings found in your admin dashboard isn’t something to be overlooked.
Welcome to part 4 of my Road to Profitable Blogging series. In this part, you will learn all about what’s inside your WordPress dashboard. Knowing where everything is located and how to customize a WordPress blog will save you precious time and prevent unnecessary headaches in the future.
Now, let me go over the standard sections of the left-hand sidebar on your WordPress Dashboard. Each section is in the descending order they appear in on the left-hand sidebar. If needed, I will include useful tips and smart recommendations for customizing the respective section.
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The Sections of a WordPress Admin Dashboard
Dashboard
The Dashboard tab gives you a brief overview of the important aspects of your website activity such as your latest blog posts, comments, security activity, and Google Analytics (with the Google Analytics WP plugin or MonsterInsights installed).
In addition, you will find WordPress news, and any website updates you may need to install.
Posts
The Posts tab is where you can view all of the posts you’ve written, create a new post, and organize your categories and tabs. When you’re ready to write a new blog post, you can click “add new” under the Posts tab.
Before you create your first blog post, I’d recommend you first continue setting up WordPress and your blogging strategy. This way you’ll have the strongest foundation right out of the gate to be successful with your blogging endeavors.
Pages
The Pages tab is designed and set up just like the Posts tab except its only for pages.
Pages vs Post difference. In case you were wondering, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two. Pages are used for static content on your website (like an About Me page) that you won’t be updating often. Posts are used for the content you see yourself giving updates to like a blog post.
Media
The Media tab is the easiest and fastest place to upload new media such as images, audio, and video to your website so they’re available for direct insertion to your posts, pages, header, and sidebar. You can also view all of your uploads in the Media Library section.
There isn’t anything to customize in the Media section. With that being said, you should compress your images, so they don’t slow down your website when loading. You can use a plugin to compress images, or do it manually. The plugin I recommend is called “Smush.”
Comments
The Comments tab shows all of the comments visitors have left on your posts and pages. You can delete, edit, approve, and reply to any of the comments here as well.
Appearance
The next tab, Appearance, is where you will customize WordPress settings the most. As the name suggests, this tab is where you can customize the appearance of your blog. It is comprised of four sub-sections. They are: Themes, Customize, Widgets, and Menus. Let me go over each one individually.
Themes
The Themes section displays your currently active theme and any themes you may have downloaded. You can also add a new theme by clicking the “Add New” tab at the top.
For my detailed article on how to choose the best WordPress theme for your blog, click here.
Customize
The Customize section is where you can customize your theme’s features such as colors, typography, headers, sidebar, site logo display, and more.
As you may have seen in my choose the best WordPress theme post, the Astra theme is my highest recommended theme. Click here for an excellent video that goes over the customization of the Astra theme (and the customization section in general).
Widgets
The Widgets section is where you can add or remove widgets from your sidebar and footer.
In case you don’t know what any of these things are, let me explain.
The sidebar is the section to the left and right (usually just the right) of a page’s body. The body is where you will see the main text and images of a blog post or page.
The footer is the bottom section of a website page. Usually, you will see information like privacy policy, terms of use, copyright, contact us, etc. located in the footer.
Widgets are simply blocks that you insert into the footer or sidebar which perform a specific function. Here are a few example widgets: social media icons, a list of your recent blog posts for users to click on, a single image, e-mail newsletter sign-up form, and more. As you can see, widgets can do all sorts of useful things!
To customize your sidebar or footer with widgets, all you have to do is drag any of the widget boxes from the left of the page to the appropriate sidebar or widget. The widgets will appear on your blog posts or pages in descending order.
Menus
The Menus section is the place where you will be creating and editing the menus that fit in your header (top of your web page) or in the footer.
The menu items can either link to a page or post on your website or to an external webpage.
Like widgets, menu items or links can be drag and dropped to a premade menu or menu you create.
Plugins
The Plugins tab contains a list of all of the plugins you have installed and activated on your website. From this tab, you can add and delete plugins as well.
If you want to learn how to choose the best WordPress plugins for blogs and how to install them, read my article here.
Users
The Users tab is where you can set user roles or create a new kind of user with a specific function(s).
For example, the Administrator role gives someone access to your entire website, including the admin backend. Other roles include editor, moderator, author, contributor, and subscriber.
Tools
The Tools tab is where you can import and export content to or from other websites you have access to (like Tumblr posts for example). You probably won’t be using the area of your dashboard much if ever, but it’s good to know you have these features available to you.
Settings
The Settings tab is where you will find the general settings for WordPress. You can edit basic things such as the timezone, date format, and the language your blog will be in.
A special note: Many of the plugins you activate will show up in the settings section for you to customize.
Besides the general settings, you can edit settings in five other categories
Writing
Writing section is where you can edit the default category and format for your posts. I recommend leaving these settings as is.
Reading
The Reading section has some basic blog and homepage settings. Most of these options with the customization you’ll find in your theme settings.
Discussion
Discussion lets you customize the way comments function on your website.
Customization tip: Check the box that says Comments must be manually approved. This is your first line of defense against potential spam or nasty comments on your blog.
Media
Media is where you can customize the maximum default size of images uploaded to your media library. I recommend using an image compressor like Smush to streamline how images function on your blog.
Permalinks
is where you can choose the format on your permalinks.
What are Permalinks?
A permalink is the set of words, numbers, or letters that come after your URL. For example, consider: www.lusterlexicon.com/make-extra-money. The permalink, in this case, is /make-extra-money.
Getting your permalinks optimized is a simple yet overlooked action you can take to boost the SEO of your blog posts.
Optimizing your permalinks is simple. You only have to change your permalinks structure. Head over to your admin dashboard and go to Settings – > Permalinks. Simply change your permalinks to “post name”.
This is much better than using the other structures and here’s why: You can’t change the dates, and if you try to change your permalinks later, the URL will 404. URLs are also uglier and harder for people to remember. To have better SEO for your URLs, keep them as short and memorable as you can.
Privacy
The Privacy section is where you can choose which page on your website functions as the privacy policy page. Privacy policies are required for any blogger who wants to be successful.
I will cover privacy policies more in the next section of my profitable blogger series.
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Phew! That was a lot to take in. Hopefully, now you have a good understanding of the standard sections of your admin dashboard. If you find yourself with advanced or specific technical questions regarding the configuration of your WordPress blog, I recommend going to wpbeginner for in-depth information and stackexchange to ask specific questions. Both are incredible resources and newbie-friendly.
One last thing before we move on to the next part of the Road to Profitable Blogging series, I’d like to show you how to integrate Google Analytics with your blog and why it’s important.
How to integrate Google Analytics with your blog
The next thing you’re going to want to do is to get Google Analytics active on your blog.
Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you detailed insights including, how many visitors you’re getting in real-time or in a timeframe, where they’re located, what pages they browse, and much more.
The information Google Analytics provides is invaluable. It allows you to better understand who’s coming to your blog and what pages are performing the best. Armed with this information, you can spend your time creating more content and updating the content that your visitors care about.
A word of advice from one blogger to another. Don’t fall into the habit of excessively checking Google Analytics. It can get addicting and take you away from creating valuable content. I speak from experience! Use Google Analytics in moderation, especially when you’re just starting out.
Anyway…
WPbeginner has an excellent article on how to get Google Analytics up and running. Before you begin, make sure you have a google account handy because you’re going to need it to pair with Google Analytics. Here is the article.
For the Google Analytics plugin, they recommend using MonsterInsights, but if you’re going the free route, I’ve found the Google Analytics WP to be more accurate.
Well, that’s it for part 4 of the Profitable Blogger series. Join me in part 5 where we cover the boring but absolutely critical stuff you need to have on your blog. Don’t worry. We’re almost at the fun stuff (creating your first post)!
Click here to move on to the next section.
