Depending on if you blog a lot, or constantly tweak your site, you may end up in your dashboard a few times a week. Some parts you visit often. Other times you stumble around trying to find what you are looking for. Space if cluttered and limited. You ask yourself, “Do I even care about half of the things on my main dashboard page”
So maybe it’s time to do a little cleanup.
At many workshops as I teach and presentations I give— to both beginners and regular users of WordPress— I still find many people who never have explored the options available for tidying up their dashboard.
First, let’s look at your sidebar menu. Once you get used to where things are, you might want to clear up a little more space by collapsing the menu.
Next, have you seen this tab at the upper right hand top side of the page you happen to be on?
Have you had the guts to click on it? If not, be adventurous. Almost every page in your dashboard has this. Even your theme options might. If you are on your main dashboard page, you get this:
Now you can clean things up. You can hide what you want to, and if you use two or more columns, just grab any box (for example, recent comments) and drag and drop them in any order you’d like.
A good reason to check the Screen Options tabs is that something may be hidden that you want to use. For example, many developers and designers hide certain blocks on pages because they assume you won’t be using them. Let’s say you suddenly want to use “excerpts” when you are doing posts. Someone gives you simple instructions. And for the life of you, you cannot find the bugger. Chances are it’s been unclicked and hidden in your screen options.
One final tip. Does your blog have 350 posts, and when you search for a certain one in your dashboard, you get 100 results, and you find yourself going from page 1 > 2 > 3 and so on? Again, your screen options to the rescue. No more clicking to the next page because you can choose how many posts are listed in a single view. You can change it from a default of 20 to 40, 150 or more.
Go ahead. Explore. You won’t break anything. Make your dashboard work for you.
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