Navigating the WordPress Dashboard

The WordPress Dashboard is like an internal homepage for your website. It’s where you can change, add, or delete content on your site. Also called the Admin Portal or simply WordPress Admin, the Dashboard is where you land when you first log in. Let’s go over how to navigate inside the dashboard.

Dashboard Page

The Dashboard Page is like a landing page or home screen. There are three pre-loaded elements:

• Getting Started gives suggestions for how to move around inside WordPress.
• Resources gives quick answers to your WordPress questions.
• Online Account is a quick link to your Northwest account.

You can move those around. You can also get them off the Dashboard Page by clicking “Screen Options” and then unchecking boxes. New boxes might appear on the Dashboard Page depending on the themes and plugins you install.

Administrative Toolbar

The Admin Toolbar is at the top of the page. It starts with the little WordPress logo on the left and goes to “Howdy, admin” on the right.

This is a place for easy clicking. Basically anything you could need instant access to is on the Admin Toolbar. The house icon lets you toggle between the Dashboard and your live site, the speech bubble lets you view comments, and +new lets you add a new page or post.

Navigation Sidebar

The Navigation Sidebar has what you need to edit the website entirely. This is accessible from the left-hand side of the screen. Let’s go over all the features:

• Dashboard redirects you to the main page or over to updates to see if any software needs updating.
• Posts adds new blogs to your website. You can save one as a draft, schedule it for later, or publish it immediately.
• Media goes to your media library. This is where you store images, PDFs, videos, and more.
• Pages adds a new page or views current published and unpublished pages.
• Comments lets you view—you guessed it—all the comments on your website’s posts (or wherever else your site allows users’ comments.)
• Appearance lets you choose a new theme or go into the design editor.
• Plugins allows you to view or add new plugins, which are add-ons that change some part of the site’s function.
• Users lets you create new accounts so other people can edit the site.
• Tools gives access to data and some of the site’s code.
• Settings is where you update information like your site name, timezone, and language.
• Collapse Menu lets you… yeah, collapse the menu. It’s really that simple.

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