5 Admin Panel Tricks for WordPress Users

WordPress offers a wonderful admin panel for start building your site. Most of the time you will be focusing too much on the content and SEO. But minor improvements in daily admin panel usage will drastically improve your overall productivity. We have been using WordPress for more than 10 years and never been checking each and every option available in the admin panel. We only access the routine menus like a robot and complete the publishing task. Only time we look into the menu bar is to find the menu item when we install a new plugin. We believe this is the case with most of the WordPress users. Considering this fact, in this article we explore 5 admin panel tricks every WordPress users should know to optimize the usage.

5 Admin Panel Tricks for Users

These are the default options available in WordPress admin panel and often overlooked. You do not need any additional plugin and your installed theme should not have any impact on these options.

1. Getting Help

It is a common habit to search in Google whenever you need help with WordPress. But the point is you can simply get the required help inside your admin panel without any plugin. On every screen, look for the “Help” menu just below the top right corner. Below picture shows getting help on the “Tools” menu.

1. Click on the “Tools” menu.
2. Click on the “Help” dropdown.
3. You will see the detailed explanation of available options on that page. For “Tools” menu, you can see the details for “Press This” and “Categories and Tags Converter” tools.
4. Links to WordPress codex and support forum are also available as more information.

You can get help on each single page on the admin panel. We never know there is a categories to tags and vice versa converter available within WordPress import section until we read this help. We bet you will also find lots of treasure by reading this hidden help menu.

2. Screen Options and Preferences

Similar to help menu, “Screen Options” menu is another hidden treasure in Classic Editor interface. You can find the screen options menu next to help menu just below the top right corner. This menu will be available only on the applicable screens and not on all. For example, you will not find screen options on “Tools” or “Settings” menu pages. It can be seen on important screens like WordPress Classic editor, which you can see when editing the posts and pages.

On visual editor screen, you can do the followings with “Screen Options” menu.

• Choose the meta boxes to be displayed on the side and below the post editor.
• Change the layout to single column from the default two columns.
• Enable or disable full height editor with distraction free functionality.

If you ever wonder where the distraction free button on the editor is gone, just enable it under “Screen Options” to bring it back. The options available under “Screen Options” in Classic Editor will change depending on the post type you edit. For example, when editing WooCommerce product pages you will find additional items like product categories, product tags, etc. Since, “Screen Options” is also available in “Posts” page you can disable unnecessary items like featured image to improve the loading speed of the page.

If you are using the latest Gutenberg block editor, you will not find “Screen Options” in the interface. However, click on the three dots “Options” icon showing on top right corner and select “Preferences” from the menu. Here, you can enable or disable blocks, meta box panels and other settings to customize the interface and to keep it clutter free.

3. Customizing Dashboard

People use the dashboard as it is after installation without changing. But you can customize to view only important things whenever you land on the dashboard.

1. Use “Screen Options” to enable or disable widgets on the dashboard.
2. Click on the “Dismiss” link to remove the “Welcome” widget from the dashboard. Basically, this will disable the “Welcome” option under “Screen Options”.
3. Drag and drop the widgets on the dashboard to make important widgets are visible on the top.

This will help to open the dashboard faster as it is the default page you will land after logging in to WordPress admin panel.

4. Collapsing and Expanding Sidebar Menu

There are many ways to work on the admin panel without distraction. Distraction free writing on the visual editor is one well-known option. But collapsing the big sidebar menu is less known to many of us. Click on the “Collapse Menu” option available as the last menu on the admin panel sidebar. Toggle between expanding and collapsing the sidebar menu to have more space and distraction free working.

5. Changing Site Language

The last trick is to change the language of your site from admin panel. Generally, most of us will provide the default language as “English (United States)” during WordPress installation. You can easily change it under “Settings > General Settings > Site Language”.

This will change all menus and options in the chosen language. Below is an example of how WordPress admin panel will look like when we choose the language as Hindi. You can also create the URLs with Hindi characters instead of English.

Be aware that changing the language not only changes the language of the admin panel, it will also change the site language. Search engines will understand that your site is primarily meant for the chosen language and prioritize the search results on geographical searches. You can see the chosen language is declared in the meta tag by viewing the page source.

Note that WordPress 5.9 onwards, you can install additional languages from “General” settings and show it in the login screen along with the default installation language. Users can select the login language and change the interface setup hassle free.

Final Words

We hope this article helped you to understand some basic tricks in WordPress admin panel and improve your productivity. Screen Options is the most useful one to remove the clutter in your screen while other tricks also useful for daily use. There are also plenty of plugins to customize admin panel and use as per your convenient.