Here are insights into the WordPress Admin Dashboard, where you’ll do all your work on your website, namely adding posts and images, sharing your site, changing the theme, and much more.
Steps to log in to WordPress
Remember you’ll log in to your WordPress backend using https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin. You can at this stage change the default password given, with your own, to increase your security and make login easy.
We will be looking at the WordPress dashboard or back-end. From the menu pane on the left of the dashboard, hover over one icon after the other to reveal the sub-items. To be found in the Dashboard Home Page is news of WordPress events, space for a quick blog post, comments, and information on some of the plugins installed. The ones you will use frequently are found in the images listed below.
The first tab you see is the name of your website. When you hover over it, ‘visit site’ tab is revealed. Toggle back and forth to the blog and back to the dashboard using those two tabs. Additionally, you can instantly view a post, go to the visual editor, see the number of comments received, and find the Yoast plugin from this bar. This is indicated in the image below.
Dashboard Screen
Dashboard Home (Screen) – Hover over ‘dashboard’ to reveal the sub-menus, ‘home and updates’. Inside the homepage can be found news items from WordPress, the provision to make a draft post, and some installed plugins. A few of already published posts on the blog can also be found here.
WordPress Dashboard home
Posts – To write a post, click on post select ‘add a new post’ to reveal the WordPress editor in visual mode. A post can be drafted in a word doc, and edited, before copying and pasting it into the visual editor. Further enhancements like sub-heading sizes and images can be added to the post in the visual editor. The tool for adding this and more options is the ‘kitchen sink’ plugin.
Wp posts (dashboard)
The sub-titles of posts are arranged according to sizes 1-6 in WordPress. Apply the sizes to your sub-headings of your post.
If you have just received your domain, you may want to know what to do after receiving your domain name.
Media
WordPress Dashboard Media
Click ‘media’ to reveal the media library where images are stored, or Click ‘Add New’ to upload new images.
Comments
Visitors’ comments are placed in the comments section of the backend, where they can be approved, given response, or sent to thrash.
Pages – are a bit like posts, except that in the settings you can choose to have a static home page or select posts if you want your recent post seen on visiting the site, as indicated in the image below. In addition, before assigning Menus to pages, Go to Menus < Manage Locations to see how many menus your theme allows. This will help you to know the number of pages to add to your menus, as a start.
Appearance
Widgets are tools that add images and text to the sidebar, header, and footer of your website. They are extremely useful and differs from theme to theme.
If you would rather watch a video on the WordPress dashboard, click the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXKwAk0j3k8.
Plugin – some plugins come with each theme. Delete the ones you don’t need and install any plugins you desire. You may also use those recommended below.
- Akismet anti-spam, or (ii) Wordfence
- Gutenberg editor
- Display kitchen sink
- GDPR cookie consent
- Contact form
- Simple social icons or (ii) social warfare
- Sitemap by Bestwebsoft
- Very simple breadcrumbs
- Wp super cache
- Yoast
Features of the plugins can be found in its description.
Users – click ‘Add New’ to assign tasks to others to do on the site.
Settings
New plugins installed will be added to the settings tab. Most of the default settings applied will be enough for your needs, but you can change some if you so wish.
Sitemap – helps bots to crawl easily for SEO purposes and also assists visitors in their search on the site. Sitemaps also inform the search engines about new content on a blog. Some WordPress themes provide a sitemap. Other ways of generating an XML sitemap is through the Yoast SEO plugin or the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
Set up the Yoast SEO Plugin
The Yoast SEO plugin helps to optimise your website to be found by the search engines; manage your titles, meta descriptions, and targeted keywords. To set up the Yoast plugin, use the following steps:
Go to Plugins < Add New.
Type in Yoast SEO, install, and activate it. It appears on the left menu pane. Click to configure it by going through the various options.
You will upload add a logo, which can be created in canva.
After writing a post, scroll down the post editor to the Yoast plugin. In ‘focus keyword’, type in the heading of your post.
In ‘preview result‘, select ‘desktop‘. Then click SEO and edit the snippet of the words or description that appears there. That is what appears in Google search results when a search is made for the terms in your title.
Then click ‘Readability’ to see your readability score, as indicated in the image below. An excellent score will be indicated by a green colour. Click the arrowed areas to reveal more parts of the post to be corrected. These are a guide to help you remember that titles and descriptions are important in SEO. Concentrate on creating awesome content and write titles that include your keywords and equally understandable to the reader.
Always remember to click ‘save draft’ after any edits you make to a post, and publish it when you are ready to do so. This can be found on the right side of the editor. You can also preview or publish from the same menu options.
Tip: Install the Grammarly app for making corrections to your posts.
How to assign menus to pages in WordPress
Before assigning categories to posts, Go to Menus < Manage Locations to see how many menus your theme allows. This will help you to know the number of categories to add to your site, as a start.
If you have already created a post that you want to assign to a page, take the following steps, which will differ from theme to theme:
Go to Page < Add New. Give the page a title and paste the text in there. Click ‘save draft’ on the right side before moving on to another page. Do this for as many pages that you have written text for.
Go to Appearance < Menus
Click ‘create a menu’. Type in the menu name or title you have in mind and click ‘save menu’. Do this for all the menus you have in mind. Menus should not be too many but the titles should be revealing enough to help a visitor find what he is looking for.
How to add Pages and Menus to WordPress
Next look for pages < add menus. Under ‘most recent’ pages first, tick the boxes beside the pages you have already created then click ‘add to menu’. You will see that it will immediately move to the next column, where you earlier saved the menus. Now drag each page name under the appropriate menu name; and also re-arrange the menus by drag and drop, as you want them to appear on the top of your website e.g home, about, contact or services. On workplaza1, the menu items are About, How to start a blog, Wealthy Affiliate Tips, and Site Info.
If the menus created do not appear as expected, check menu settings to either select or de-select the options stated there.
You can alternatively add menus under Appearance < Customise < Menus by following the instructions.
How to create Categories in WordPress
To create categories and tags for your posts, go to categories which is a sub-item in the posts menu. Create a new category, give it a name, and add a slug. Select ‘parent‘ if there will be more sub-categories under this new category, or ‘none‘ if it is only related to the post. Also, give a short description and click ‘add new category’.
Add only three to five sub-items under a category to show on the header, as Post meta, and breadcrumb settings all help to group other posts related to the ‘parent’ category. If you are writing about children grouped into boys and girls for example, any post related to each group will be indexed under the group automatically.
How to create Creating Tags in WordPress
Tags are also added to the various groups, for example, different tags will go with, boys’ clothing as opposed to girls’ clothing.
Categories and tags can also be created in the column on the right side of the visual editor where you write your posts.
These are some of the important settings that go with your posts. With these insights into the WordPress Dashboard, you are ready to start with or continue writing and posting posts for your website.
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