How to Manage WordPress Admin Guages on Your Hosting Account

WordPress is the #2 most popular CMS (Content Management System) with over 27 million downloads. Its popularity continues to grow as more and more people are realizing the benefits of a stable, professional-looking website built on the platform.

WordPress is a great choice for building a blog or a business website. It is extremely flexible and easily customizable. Being open-source software, it is constantly being improved and updated by the WordPress community. Because of this, you will always find new and unique features being added to the platform.

As the name would suggest, WordPress is controlled via the WordPress Admin area. This area is where you will find the backend of your site, containing all the useful features and functionalities that make up your blog. The WordPress admin is where all the configuration settings for your site are saved, as well as the ability to add/remove users, and edit the content of your site.

If you have set up a WordPress-powered blog, then you must already have a WordPress Admin area. Most WordPress installations come with a standard dashboard that hosts multiple tabs, including Settings, Blog, and Media.

Introducing The WordPress Back Office

A WordPress back office, or simply admin area, is where all the configuration and management activities for your site take place. When logged in as the site’s administrator, you will be greeted with a dashboard, displaying all the essential tools required for running and maintaining a successful website.

Below the dashboard is a navigation area, containing all the links leading to other important sub-sections of WordPress. While exploring this area, you will find various tools and utilities, allowing you to perform essential tasks for managing and maintaining your site.

From the above screenshots, you can see that the WordPress admin area comes with multiple tabs, including:

  • Settings
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Users
  • Tools
  • Help

The Settings Tab

To dive into the Settings tab, click on it from the above screenshots.

The Settings tab is where you will find all the configuration settings for WordPress. This includes everything from the plugins you use on your site to the theme’s setup, colors, and more.

As with all the other tabs, navigating to the Settings tab from the WordPress admin area will take you to the dashboard, where you will find all the relevant options for the section you have selected.

The Blog Tab

The Blog tab of the WordPress admin area is where you will find all the configuration settings for your blog. When creating a new blog using WordPress, you will be landing on this tab, as it is the default option when publishing a new post.

As the name would suggest, the Blog tab contains all the configurations for your blog, including the name, description, and the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for your site.

The Media Tab

The Media tab of the WordPress admin area is where you will find all the configurations for your site’s media. Most websites will have a defined set of image, audio, and video files that can be used for content on the site. When uploading media to your site, you will be landing on this tab.

The Media tab contains three areas of interest:

  • Media Library
  • Upload Settings
  • Galleries

The Media Library is where you will find all the files for your media, accessible and viewable by the public. The media files themselves are stored on your hosting account, within a designated folder.

The Upload Settings controls the way files are uploaded to your site. For instance, you may want to set the maximum size limit for an image file, or whether or not to allow users to select multiple files when uploading a batch of images.

The Users Tab

The Users tab of the WordPress admin area is where you will find all the configurations for the site’s users. The Users tab will only be of interest to those running an authenticated user base for their site. If you are running a blog, then you will not need this tab.

WordPress comes with a built-in user database called WordPress.org. This database can be accessed and modified through the dashboard, allowing you to add and remove users as needed. It is also possible to create new user profiles, grant them specific permissions, and modify their attributes (such as username and password).

Additionally, you can control who can view or edit the content of your site. By implementing a simple form of role-based access control (RBAC), you can let certain individuals have more access to certain areas of your site than others. For example, you could give the user with the role of editor access to edit all the content on your site, while giving the user with the role of reader only access to view the published content.

The Tools Tab

The Tools tab of the WordPress admin area is where you will find all the configuration settings for your site’s tools or widgets. The Tools tab is also where you will find popular plugins that can be installed on your site to enhance its functionality.

WordPress comes with a variety of tools that can be used to enhance one’s blogging experience, ranging from simple text utilities to more complex tools that can be used to build fully functioning websites. Some of these tools can also be used to create and manage themes and plugins for WordPress, should you want to learn more.

The Help Tab

The Help tab of the WordPress admin area is where you will find all the configurations for the site’s support. When searching for help with WordPress, you will most often find relevant and useful information, as well as tutorials and videos that can be helpful. The Help tab is also the place where you can access various WordPress communities, such as blogs and forums, if you want to find additional support.

The Dashboard

This section would not be complete without mentioning the dashboard, or main area of the WordPress admin area. The dashboard is where you will find all the relevant information for the section you have selected. When logged in as the site’s administrator, you will see a navigation menu, followed by a box displaying all the active widgets and tools in your WordPress install.

The WordPress dashboard can be a great place to start when exploring the different aspects of the platform. You can use the dashboard to find out more about a specific feature, or to access all the available tools and utilities for that section.

Explore The WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins are tiny programs or extensions that can be included in your blog post to enhance its functionality. In the same way that you can install plugins into the WordPress dashboard to add new features to your site, you can also upload them to your site’s folder via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or let WordPress automatically discover and load them from the WordPress plugins directory.

If you have multiple sites that you manage, then you can also use the plugin directory to find and load plugins that are relevant to the other sites.

As with all the other areas of the WordPress admin interface, you can use the plugins to perform different tasks, ranging from simple things such as correcting spelling and importing content to more complex things such as online stores or blog comment moderation. Additionally, you can create plugins that do anything from displaying the latest social media posts to an area of your site that allows visitors to post their own reviews of services or products.

To see all the plugins available for WordPress, visit the official plugin directory, or search for plugins on Google.

The Different Types Of WordPress Hosting Accounts

A hoster is the company that provides the space for your site on the internet. Below is a generalized list of the different types of WordPress hosting accounts, along with their associated advantages and disadvantages: