How to Customize the WordPress Dashboard
Have you ever gone to log in to your WordPress site and wished it was more… fun? After about a decade using WordPress, I’ve felt that way so many times. Luckily, you can customize your WordPress dashboard (and log in screen) in many different ways – most of them free, quick, and painless. You can use code for some of these things. But in the spirit of WordPress, this post will contain non-code options.
Why Customize the WordPress Dashboard?
There are quite a few reasons why it’s worthwhile to spend a bit of time customizing the dashboard – really, the entire admin area – either for yourself or for your clients.
Fun
Yeah, I’m counting fun as a real reason. You spent all this time and money (and maybe stress) on getting this website launched. You don’t want it to feel like a chore to use. A custom dashboard simply makes it a more enjoyable experience to log in and do what you have to do.
And when you provide a custom dashboard for clients – complete with their brand colors, logos, etc. – they tend to feel a stronger sense of ownership, attachment, and even affection toward the site. And guess what? A site your client cares about will probably get updated more, perform better, and just be better taken care of.
Ease of Use
We aren’t just talking about aesthetics here. There are lots of ways to customize the dash to make it easier to navigate. Things like trimming the main dashboard widgets, limiting the number of navigation menu items, color-coding certain things, etc. can make the experience feel less daunting.
Time Savings
When the experience is more streamlined and straightforward, it’s usually easier to find things. You’ll spend less time hunting for the setting you want. And when clients have a custom dash, they’re less likely to get lost or overwhelmed. For example, a content manager probably doesn’t need their menu cluttered up with the development plugins you use. They just want to find where to edit pages and posts.
Security
Believe it or not, I do believe that a custom dash is a more secure dash. A client who logs in to update a photo is less likely to accidentally disable a plugin or delete a page if their access is customized (aka, limited). And if that client is fired or leaves the company disgruntled, if their site access was limited to begin with, there’s little they could do by way of sabotage. If the only person who has access to important code or security settings is the person who knows what to do with that info, you’re cutting back on the potential for a sticky situation.
That Extra Mile
Delighting your clients, not just providing the service they paid for, can make all the difference. Customizing the dashboard is one extra thing you can do to win or satisfy a client. If you know what you’re doing, this is a perfect low-effort/high-payoff piece to add to your process. Instead of leaving your client with a complicated expensive thing they might feel intimidated to interact with, give them a custom, branded experience that is catered to them.
All right, enough of the why. You’re here for the how. If you’d prefer a more visual experience, I put together a quick video tour of how I’d customize a dashboard for a client. Or, use the steps and links below to follow along yourself.
Here’s how my test site login page looked before:
And here’s what the Dashboard looked like:
Customizing the Login Page
Create a Branded Login Page
The WordPress login page is the first impression your site makes to administrators. The typical layout and design is just fine, but you can make it all your own.
I recommend the free LoginPress plugin.
Once you install it, you can do a ton of different things including adding new styles to the login page. Go to LoginPress > Customizer to start editing the page’s design.
Each element on the page will show you a blue pencil. Select to edit that area.
For this website, we added the client’s logo in addition to changing the colors and background. We made the login button itself larger. We also increased the size of the “Forgot Password” message and changed the wording. Overall it makes for a much more fun experience.
Customize the Dashboard Widgets
The first page upon logging in is probably my least favorite part of out-of-the-box WordPress. No matter what, it ends up looking messy and unorganized. So most people ignore it and skip around to whatever it is they logged in to do. But this area can be so powerful – if you know how to organize it.
Reorganize the Widgets
By default, you can move around and hide all the widgets on this page. Plugins like Gravity and WooCommerce provide you with very helpful widgets with analytics and notifications that could make your experience smoother. But they have to be in the right place and set up properly to be useful.
Each widget has a thin up and down arrow, and a solid up arrow. Use the thin up and down arrows to move widgets around, or merely drag and drop them. Use the solid up arrow to close a widget. And you can even remove widgets entirely. At the top of the screen, select Screen Options and deselect the widgets you no longer want to see.
To start with, our example site is messy and unorganized. You’d have to scroll to get to the data the client wants.
After adjusting things, the WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, and SEO widgets are available right at the top. These are the things the client cares about, so they’ll be updated and visible immediately.
Hide Alerts
I’m sure you’ve logged into a WordPress website before and been bombarded with notification bars. Plugins asking you to update, to provide a review, technical notifications you may not understand. If you’re the Admin of the site, these all may be very important to you. But if you’re just logging in to change a photo, you may not want to see them. Clients may get concerned, click on one of the notifications, and end up breaking a part of the site they shouldn’t have touched.
So – here’s how to hide them!
Use the free Hide Dashboard Notifications plugin to clear them from view. Select Hide Notices from the menu, then toggle on or off which types of notifications you want to hide.
You can also decide which users can see these notifications, and which can’t. This means the admin will see all the important alerts, but the client logging in to update a photo won’t see them.
Alter User Role Permissions
By default, WordPress allows you to assign different users different roles. Each role has a unique combination of permissions. For example, Admins can access all the information on the site. But an Author can only write, edit, publish, and delete posts for which they are the author. Check the full list of roles and permissions here.
If you need more custom options, I recommend the free Members plugin.
For our example site, I want the Editor to be able to manage posts, but not publish them. By default, they can do both.
I can go to Members > Roles, then find Editor and select Edit.
On the subsequent page, I can adjust the settings to customize the role. Now, when someone logs in who is an Editor, they can do everything an Editor can do by default, except publish posts.
Customize the Admin Navigation
I’ve worked with many clients who, when logging into WordPress, are intimidated by the long list of menu items. The black admin navigation along the left side can seem daunting. There are a ton of links and it’s not always clear what they’re for. Some of them may have red alerts next to them.
Minimize that feeling of overwhelm by organizing your admin navigation. I use the free Admin Menu Editor plugin to do this. With this plugin, you can:
- Change menu titles and icons
- Organize the order of the menu items
- Change menu permissions based on role
- Rearrange sub-menus
- Hide menu items altogether
- Add new menu items
Currently, the menu for this site has 26 menu items! Let’s make it more streamlined.
For my site, I want to create specialized areas for my client. Here’s what I want to accomplish:
- I want the client to only see the menu options to update pages, add posts, add images, and view form entries.
- I want to change their names.
- I want to change their order.
- I want to arrange all the other options, first by setting items, then by plugin setting items.
Using the plugin, I can drag and drop menu items, change their titles, and hide them. Use the instructions along the right hand side if you get stuck.
Now, when the client logs in, they can find their four options up top. Anything below can be made inaccessible to them, or hidden altogether.
Bonus Customization
The admin experience isn’t just limited to the dashboard. Go a step further and provide some usability improvements to areas where people spend a lot of time – editing pages and posts.
Change the Screen Options for Pages and Posts
Depending on what the client uses the site for, some screen options on the Pages and Posts pages may be more important than others. For example, on this site, all the pages show every possible column of information. But this creates visual clutter and doesn’t help the client understand and find things at a glance.
You don’t need a plugin this time – go to Screen Options and simply toggle on and off the options you want to see. For this site, it’s important for the client to see the title of the page (you can’t turn this off), who published it (Author), the date on which it was published, and its general SEO score – that’s it!
You can also change the number of items per page, and even how compact the view is.
Customize the Block Editor Preferences
Finally, you can really get custom when it comes to actually creating content using the Block Editor.
This tiny icon beside the Publish button is full of incredible customization options that often go overlooked. You can change the View and what panels are visible from here. This can help to streamline the content-creation process.
Scroll all the way to the bottom of this list and choose Preferences. Here you can toggle on and off options about how the Block Editor works with you. For example, on this site I can:
- Begin each new page showing starter patterns, making the designers job easier
- Hide discussion and page attributes settings since they aren’t useful here
- Highlight the current block with Spotlight Mode
- Show button text labels
- Show most used blocks, since this design uses the same blocks often
- Hide blocks that won’t be used in order to make finding needed ones faster
If your site’s content is being updated often, it’s worth it to dive into the Block Editor preferences to customize your experience.
To Sum Up
There you have it! Did we forget your favorite way to customize the WordPress site editing experience? Let us know in a comment below.
