Today we are going to look at the Desktop or Control Panel in WordPress, the great unknown, and the first thing you find when you access the WordPress control panel.
WordPress Dashboard
When we install WordPress and access the control panel for the first time, we find a page called “Desktop” with 5 widgets. These are not to be confused with the widgets in the “Appearance” menu, which are the ones that are displayed on the frontend (the website that users see). These boxes can be minimised or hidden. To minimise them, simply click on the little arrow at the top right.
But we can go one step further. We can hide the ones we want by clicking on “Screen options”. This will bring up a menu that will allow us to hide or show the ones we want at will.
And of course, we will have a completely empty desk.
Well, now that we have learned how to minimise and display desktop widgets, let’s see what those 5 widgets are, and what they are for.
Widget “Welcome to WordPress”
This widget welcomes us very politely, and gives us several options or shortcuts, quite useful for newbies in the WordPress world.
Among the shortcuts, we have:
- Button “Customise your site”: Access to the menu “Appearance / Customise”.
- Change your theme completely: Access to the menu “Appearance / Themes”.
- Write your first blog entry: Go to menu “Entries / Add new”.
- Write your first blog entry: Go to menu “Pages / Add new”.
- View your site: Direct access to the backend (to the web)
- Manage widgets: Access to the menu “Appearance / Widgets”.
- Manage menus: Access to the menu “Appearance / Menus”.
- Enable or disable comments: “Settings / Comments”.
Learn more on how to get started: Direct access to an external WordPress.org page with a basic guide. So, we see that this widget that takes up the entire width of the screen does not add any functionality, but simply some useful shortcuts for those who do not know WordPress.
“Activity” widget
The activity widget shows us the last published posts, the date and time they were published, and the last comments, in which we can see the comment itself, the post in which it was made, and the author of the comment. This widget is especially interesting if we have a blog with multiple authors and many comments, as we can quickly see what’s new. But if we have a single-author blog, it is not so useful.
Widget “Quick draft”
This widget offers us the possibility to write a new draft in an easy and quick way. We just have to put a title, a minimum text, and click on the “Save draft” button.
Although the functionality is interesting, the reality is that this widget is rarely used, as people prefer to create their drafts from “Posts / Add new”, where there are more options.
“At a glance” widget
A purely informative widget that shows us the number of posts, pages, comments and any other custom post type (CPT) that we have created, such as products, portfolios or any other.
Widget “WordPress News”
Finally we have a news widget. This is WordPress-related news from third-party websites, such as the official WordPress blog, Matt Mullenweg’s blog (WordPress co-founder), WPTavern and so many more, which have earned to appear in this location. The WordPress dashboard desktop is terribly underutilised, as these five plugins have little or no functionality, and are purely informational. So I recommend that you hide them and put something else in their place.
If you found this interesting you can also read more posts from our seo is deas club blog. For example, we show you this trick to remove the shortcode that bothers you from your wordpress with this plugin.
And of course, it is very important to learn how to update wordpress manually. I know it is very easy to do it automatically with the push of a button, but we also want to show you this more classic method.
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