How to use the WordPress back office?

A username. A password. A quick click on the “Log In” button. And that’s it, you’re in. You are now logged in to the WordPress back office. 

It is from this strategic control center that you can do everything — or almost everything — on your website.

Now you just need to know how to use it properly so you can take full advantage of it. That is the purpose of this article, which will reveal everything on the subject. 

By the end of your reading, you will know what the WordPress back office is used for. And above all,  how to make the best use of it to manage your website, thanks to our dozens of practical tips and pieces of advice.

 

What is the WordPress back office?

The WordPress back office refers to your website’s administration interface. It corresponds to your dashboard. Accessible from a login page where you must enter a username and password, this area allows the administrator in particular to manage and customize their website.

 It is from this nerve center that you can: 

• carry out updates to your themes, plugins, and the WordPress Core (i.e., its basic files and folders); 
• add content (posts, pages, media); 
• adjust the appearance of your site via your WordPress theme; 
• make various settings (permalinks, comments, privacy, users, etc.); 
• integrate new features using WordPress plugins; 
• add new users and manage them (roles, etc.).

A private interface with more or less restricted use

The back office of the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) also has a few characteristics of its own: 

• no coding knowledge is required to administer it;
• in a way, it is a private interface that can only be accessed by people with a user account (administrator, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber).
  The range of permitted actions then depends on the rights granted to the user.
  An administrator has all privileges: they can modify whatever they want in the back office. Whereas a subscriber can only modify their profile;
• access to the WooCommerce back office works in the same way as for a standard showcase website. You access it via your login page and then find the options for your WordPress ecommerce site in your administration sidebar.

What is the difference between the WordPress back office and front office?

Before moving on, it is important to understand what differentiates the WordPress back office from the front office. 

As you have just read, the back office is only accessible to people with a user account. It is, in a way, the invisible part of your WordPress site.

Conversely, the front office—literally the front-facing part—refers to the public part of your WordPress site. It is what your visitors see when they view your pages from a web browser.

If we were to illustrate it, we could say that the front office is like a shop window: everyone can see it.

The back office, on the other hand, is like the stockroom. Only authorized people (the shop managers) can enter it to manage stock, carry out an inventory, etc.

In the jargon, we also talk about front-end and back-end development. Front-end development focuses on modifying the visual appearance of a website (it acts on the front office), whereas back-end development involves working on elements that are invisible to visitors (server or hosting provider, application, database), i.e. the back office. 

How do you access the WordPress back office?

The standard procedure 

After this theoretical overview, let’s move on to practice by detailing how to access the WordPress back office (WordPress back office, in English).

In this regard, you may be wondering what the WordPress back office address is? Indeed, it is essential in order to log in to your administration area. 

By default, this address always includes your domain name (e.g.: yoursite.com). This is the address of your site on the internet. 

You must then add one of the following two elements to your domain name: 

1. Either /wp-admin.
2. Or /wp-login.php.

In short, if you want to access the back office of your WordPress website, you need to enter the following URL in your web browser: votresite.fr/wp-admin.

If you are not already logged in, WordPress will automatically redirect you to its login page, accessible via this URL (votresite.fr/wp-login.php).

You will then land on the page below, which asks you to enter your username or email address, as well as a password. These two keys are required to access the back office.

The case of subdomains and subdirectories

The login method via /wp-admin or /wp-login.php will work for all sites that have not changed their back office login URL (this is a good security practice, and we will explain how to set it up a little later in this article). 

If you are unable to access the WordPress login page via a default URL (e.g.: monsite.fr/wp-admin), it is probably because: 

• the webmaster of the site in question has changed the login page URL to protect against hacking attacks; 
• the site is hosted on a subdomain (e.g.: maintenance.votresite.fr) or a subdirectory (e.g.: votresite.fr/maintenance).
  In this case, you will need to enter maintenance.votresite.fr/wp-admin to access the WordPress back office of a site using a subdomain.
  Or votresite.fr/maintenance/wp-admin to access the admin area of a site placed in a subdirectory. 

Once logged in, you can carry out many operations of varying technical complexity. We will detail them in the next section.

What are the main features of the back office?

Overview of the WordPress back office dashboard

You are now on your WordPress dashboard. To put it simply, it can be divided into 3 parts: 

1. The sidebar located on your left (1). It contains the various menus of your site, allowing you to perform basic actions (e.g.: adding a post or a photo).
2. The top bar (2), which provides direct access to creation options (post, media file, page, account). You can also edit your profile and log out in the section on the right, under the message “Hello, webmaster” (webmaster is the username for this test site).
3. The central section (3), organized into panels or tabs that you can move manually. Depending on the tab, you can notably see your site’s health status, published content, the active theme, published comments, or recent WordPress events.

Speaking of which, we will now take a look at the different menus available in the sidebar of your back office. 

Good to know: Remember to update your plugins, themes, and WordPress core as soon as updates are available. You can access them via the Dashboard > Updates menu. 

Tip: If you click on the “Screen Options” menu located at the top of your admin interface, you can choose to show/hide the sections you want. To do this, simply check or uncheck the boxes corresponding to the tab of your choice. 

Posts and pages

From your back office, you can add or edit posts and pages.

To add a post, click Posts > Add New. To organize them, you also have the option of adding categories and tags. 

To add a page, click Pages > Add New. 

Good to know: Posts and pages are two different types of content. A post contains dynamic content linked to a publication date. This is the format you will use to publish on your blog, for example. A page contains “static” content, meaning timeless content. Unlike posts, “pages are intended for non-chronological content,” explains the official WordPress documentation. If you want to present your company’s service offering, for example, you would create a page. 

If you go to the Posts > All Posts or Pages > All Pages menu, you will have an overview of the various content you have published. 

Several pieces of information will be displayed, such as the publication date or the content author. You can also carry out several actions: edit, move to trash, view the content, etc.

Practical tip: If you want to easily customize the columns of your admin interface, use the Admin Columns plugin. With it, you can display many additional options such as a Featured Image in the list of your posts/pages, the word count and the excerpt of a piece of content, etc.

Media

Thanks to the “Media” menu, you can add different types of media, namely: images, audio, videos, documents, spreadsheets, etc.

To do this, upload the files of your choice or drag and drop them via the Media > Add menu.

You can change their display mode by clicking one of the two icons below:

Tip: To avoid overly affecting the loading speed of your site’s pages, compress the size of your images with a plugin like Imagify. If you plan to add videos, try not to upload them directly to your site. This will overload your database and slow down your site speed. Instead, add a direct link in your content to a video hosted on a platform such as YouTube or Vimeo.

Comments

As its name suggests, the WordPress “Comments” menu lists all the comments (published or awaiting publication) on your site.

In particular, you can approve them, mark them as spam, or move them to the trash. 

Tip: To limit spam comments, activate the essential Akismet plugin in your admin interface. 

WordPress Appearance Menu

The Appearance menu first allows you to install or change a theme. WordPress absolutely needs a theme to work. A theme controls the visual appearance of your site.

By default, WordPress will activate one of its native themes when you install it. These themes start with “Twenty” something. 

For example, when writing this article, we used WordPress version 6.2.2, which comes with the Twenty Twenty-Three theme. 

Native themes are very well designed, lightweight, and efficient. However, they offer few customization options for a beginner user.

If this is your situation, we recommend instead choosing one of the themes below, which will be more comprehensive: 

• Astra ; 
• Kadence ; 
• GeneratePress ; 
• Blocksy ;
• Neve.

In addition, you can easily pair it with a page builder such as the Divi Builder or Elementor to create even more advanced layouts.

If you use a block-based theme, meaning one that is compatible with the Site Editor, you will have direct access to this editor via the Appearance > Editor menu.

From there, you will be able to modify every area of your site, from the header to the footer, as well as the body of the page.

You will also be able to customize your page templates and menus using this editor. However, we primarily recommend this editor for people who are experienced with WordPress and have a solid foundation in web design.

For more beginner-level users, it is better to use one of the themes presented a little earlier. If you use one of them, such as Astra for example, your Appearance menu will then be more complete. 

You will have options for creating menus, and the theme’s visual customization will be handled through what is called the Customizer. This can be accessed via the Appearance > Customize menu.

Plugins

Let’s continue our guided tour of the back office with an introduction to the “Plugins” menu. A plugin allows you to add features to your site without coding.

There are nearly 60,000 of them in the official WordPress directory across many areas (SEO, security, performance, design, etc.).

As with posts and pages, you will find the list of all your plugins (active or inactive) under Plugins > Installed Plugins.

In particular, you can access their settings, deactivate and delete (remove) them, or even enable automatic updates.

To help make things clearer, here are some essential plugins to activate on WordPress: 

• an SEO plugin like SEOPress, Yoast SEO or Rank Math ; 
• a security plugin like Wordfence, iThemes Security or SecuPress ; 
• an anti-spam plugin like Akismet ; 
• a plugin to speed up the loading time of your pages like WP Rocket ; 
• a backup plugin like UpdraftPlus ; 
• a plugin to reduce the size of your images like Imagify. 

Good to know: If possible, avoid activating too many plugins on your site. The more plugins you host, the more likely you are to negatively impact your page loading speed, which is bad for the user experience (UX). At the same time, delete plugins you no longer use to avoid overloading your database. Finally, do not install duplicate plugins. For example, use only one SEO, security, or backup plugin at a time to avoid the risk of incompatibility. 

Accounts

The “Accounts” menu lists the different users who have access to your site, along with their respective roles. 

As a reminder, WordPress offers different roles: 

• the administrator has access to all administration features; 
• the editor can publish and manage posts, including posts by other users;
• the author can publish and manage their own posts;
• the contributor can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them;
• the subscriber can only manage their profile.

In the Accounts > Profile menu, you can edit certain information in your profile, such as your password, your photo, your email, or the name to be displayed publicly on your site.

Good to know: If you manage a WordPress multisite network, you will have the role called “Super Admin,” which has the power to administer the entire network.  

Tools

Let’s move on to the penultimate menu in your interface: “Tools.” This is where you can import or export data. 

Also note that you have access to your site’s Health. WordPress informs you in particular about the presence of critical issues, while recommending certain actions to take to improve performance or the user experience.

Settings

Let’s finish this section with the “Settings” menu. This is where you can configure many options related to comments, permalinks, media, or even your site’s privacy. 

We won’t go into the details of each setting, as that’s not the purpose of this article. However, here are a few best practices to adopt on your site: 

• choose a default category for your posts in the Settings > Writing menu. And above all, delete the “Uncategorized” category which is of no use to your visitors or search engines; 
• do not check the box “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” in the Settings > Reading menu. Otherwise, your site will not appear in search engine results pages and will be invisible;
• to fight comment spam, check the following boxes in Settings > Comments: “The author of a comment must provide their name and email address” and “The comment must be approved manually ”. Finally, uncheck the box “Enable threaded comments up to X levels deep”;

• check that your permalink structure is set to “Post name” (in Settings > Permalinks).

By now, the WordPress back office should be much more familiar to you. You know how it is organized and have the basics to manage and administer it properly.

To go further, we will now reveal some tips to strengthen its security and customize it in your own image. 

How can you customize your site’s back office?

How can you change the URL of the login page to your WordPress back office?

A good practice for securing access to your administration area is to change the URL of your login page (votresite.fr/wp-admin or votresite.fr/wp-login.php).

Thanks to this, you will limit brute-force attacks. These are login attempts carried out automatically by bots.

They enter combinations of usernames and passwords in an attempt to access your dashboard and hack you. 

If your login page is not accessible via WordPress’s default URL, you will make their lives much more difficult. 

At the same time, the fewer brute-force attacks you experience, the more bandwidth you save on your hosting server. In terms of performance, that is always a significant plus.

Good to know: To limit brute-force attacks, you can either use an option offered by a general-purpose security plugin such as iThemes Security or SecuPress, or opt for a dedicated plugin such as Limit Login Attempts Reloaded.

Enable the WPS Hide Login plugin to limit login attempts to the WordPress back office

To protect access to your WordPress admin, you can of course do it through code. However, this remains a technical solution.

You need to be sure of what you are doing and make the changes in the right place to avoid errors that would make it impossible to access your site.

The safest and fastest way is to use a plugin called WPS Hide Login. 

Once you have activated it, go to the Settings > WPS Hide Login menu. At the bottom of the page, you will find a section called “WPS Hide Login”. In this section, enter a new login URL after your domain name.

Choose something incomprehensible, for example with a combination of numbers and letters (lowercase and uppercase):

In the box below, you can also enter a redirect URL for when someone tries to access the wp-login.php page and the wp-admin directory while not logged in.

Since this plugin makes the wp-admin directory and the wp-login.php page inaccessible, remember to note down your new login URL in a text file on your computer and add it to your browser bookmarks.

If you ever can no longer access your new login page, deactivate or delete the WPS Hide Login plugin from your favorite FTP client (e.g.: Filezilla). 

Good to know: Some general security plugins, such as iThemes Security, also allow you to change the URL used to access the WordPress admin. If that is the case with yours, there is no need to use WPS Hide Login.
While you’re at it, also take advantage of your security plugin to enable two-factor authentication, as well as a web application firewall if these features are available. 
Finally, remember to use strong passwords, for example with a free online password generator. This will help strengthen the security of your WordPress website. 

How to customize the back-office login page?

Once your new WordPress admin login page is more secure, you can start customizing it. 

By default, this page lacks personality and identity, with its gray background and WordPress logo. If you create websites for clients, you can design a custom page for them using one of the following plugins: 

• Login Designer ; 
• Custom Login Page Customizer ; 
• LoginPress.

Login Designer, for example, offers ready-to-use templates for the WordPress login page. 

You can also customize each section of the page to adapt it to your overall messaging and brand identity: 

• the background;
• the username and password fields; 
• the various text elements; 
• the login button; 
• the site logo;
• the error messages that will be displayed.

It is also possible to add a language switcher and Google reCAPTCHA. Next, we will show you how to customize the style (colors, etc.) of your WordPress back office. 

How to change the style of your WordPress back office?

With the WordPress Accounts menu

By default, the creative options offered by WordPress are fairly limited when it comes to designing an interface that reflects your image. 

However, you still have the option to change the color scheme of your admin interface. 

To do this, go to the Accounts > Profile > Admin Color Scheme menu. You can choose from 9 different color scheme options:

With a plugin or a theme

To go further, as is often the case, you can use a dedicated plugin. We already told you about the excellent Admin Columns at the beginning of this article; it is not the only one. 

To modify the appearance, display, and communication of your admin area as you wish, we recommend taking a look at the following plugins: 

• Ultimate Dashboard, to design a custom dashboard; 
• White Label CMS, to add your branding to the header and footer, customize the dashboard, and control the menus displayed for your client; 
• Admin Menu Editor and WP Custom Admin Interface, to manually edit your dashboard menus (reorganize menus, show/hide certain menus, modify permissions, etc.); 
• Adminimize, to remove certain menus based on the user’s role.

Good to know: Be aware that there are also themes (WordPress back office themes) that include multiple features for customizing your WordPress back office. This is the case, for example, with the premium theme Adminify. 

How do I share access to my WordPress back office?

To conclude this article, we will show you what options are available if you want to share access to your administration interface with a third party.

This is a procedure that will be essential if you work with other collaborators (e.g., writers) or with clients. 

Method for a production site

Let’s first look at the case of a site that is already online (in production).

Let’s imagine that you are the site administrator and that you need to give a technician access to your back office, for example for a WordPress support operation.

To begin with, never share your administrator username and password with anyone, even if you trust the person.

A good practice is to create a new user, granting them the role of your choice. 

Create a new user 

To do this, go to the Accounts > Add menu. Fill in the requested information and be sure to:

• create a strong password. WordPress has a very handy automatic generator for this; 
• check the “Send the person an email about their account” box so that they receive a notification allowing them to log in;
• choose the appropriate user role. For an editor, the contributor role, or even the author role (if you want the person to be able to publish), is sufficient.
  For an external contributor (such as a maintenance or support technician), you may sometimes need to consider creating an administrator account so they can access all WordPress options.

Once the person has completed their assignment or no longer needs to log in to your site, you are in control of what happens next. So remember to delete their account in Accounts > All accounts.

Good to know: The plugin Temporary Login without Password allows you to configure temporary access to WordPress. The extension generates a link that makes it possible to log in to WordPress without a username or password. As an administrator, you can, for example, set how long the person will be able to log in to your site, without having to create an account for them. You can also assign them the user role of your choice. It is a very good solution if you do not want to create an account for different users for a very occasional need (e.g.: intervention by a developer or an agency on your website). 

Method for a website installed locally

If you create websites for yourself or your clients (as an agency or freelancer), you may be used to working locally. 

It’s handy for creating your layouts without the hassle. If there’s a problem, you’re working on your own machine, so there’s no risk of crashing a live site. 

Yes, but here’s the thing. What happens if your client (agency or individual) asks you for access to your admin area, for example to see the progress of your work… and of their future site? 

At first glance, this seems impossible, unless you use the Local tool (formerly Local by Flywheel). 

Well, let’s temper that a little. Technically, you won’t be able to grant your client (and/or their team, if it’s an agency) access to the admin area.

However, the person will be able to see what the front-end rendering looks like thanks to a feature called Live Link. An explanatory tutorial is available here. 

That’s already pretty good, and it’s actually impossible to do with tools like MAMP or XAMP. So make the most of it!

Summary

Thanks to your WordPress admin area, you can manage and customize your site however you want. Throughout these lines, you have discovered: 

• what this interface is used for; 
• how to access it; 
• what its main features are;
• how to customize and secure it;
• how to share its access with a third party. 

Thanks to our practical tips and advice, you now know how to make the best use of your administration interface. 

Are you experiencing a bug, a display issue, or facing a hack that is preventing you from accessing your admin area?

Contact the Maintenance WP team. Available 7 days a week, our WordPress support service will offer you a tailor-made solution that meets your needs quickly, professionally, and efficiently.