Tutorial: Customizing the WordPress Dashboard

If you need help using WordPress, you may want to see this step-by-step tutorial on how to use your site’s administration area: The WP Administration Section – An Overview.

Is your website or blog powered by WordPress? If so, and you have to log in and out of your admin area on a regular basis, it’s useful to know how to customize your WordPress Dashboard.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you a number of simple things you can do to customize the WordPress back-end without modifying any web code.

How To Declutter The Dashboard Area

As your site gets bigger, your admin area can start looking quite busy …

Fortunately, you can “tidy up” your work area by hiding, minimizing and rearranging your admin panels.

Hiding Information Panels

The Screen Options feature is located in the top-right corner of your WordPress admin screen, in the header area …

In the main Dashboard, clicking on the Screen Options tab lets you specify options like which panels of your Dashboard screen you want to hide or display …

By hiding/displaying, you can organize your admin dashboard, and display only necessary information …

Minimizing WP Dashboard Panels

As well as hiding elements, you can minimize content blocks in your dashboard area by clicking on the little inverted triangle in the corner of a panel’s title bar …

This will help keep your working area uncluttered. You can expand/collapse as much information in your dashboard section as you like …

Rearranging WordPress Dashboard Elements

You can also rearrange the layout of your admin dashboard just by dragging and dropping these around …

Some content panels allow you to configure additional display options that may not be obvious at first glance …

If you hover over the panel with your mouse, however, you will see a link appear that lets you further configure the information …

As well as being able to reorganize information inside your dashboard, you can also change the color scheme of your admin area directly from within your WordPress settings, or by using plugins …

To change the color scheme of your WordPress dashboard, click on the “Howdy, User” tab at the very top right hand corner of your admin screen and choose Edit My Profile…

You can also get to this screen by clicking on Your Profile in the menu …

Don’t forget to click the Update Profile button at the bottom of your page to update your settings …

Your new dashboard colour scheme will take effect immediately …

Hopefully, this tutorial has shown you a number of simple ways to customize your control panel without touching code or adding extra plugins. All it takes is a few clicks of your mouse button.

Tutorial: Customizing the WordPress Dashboard