WordPress Lesson 2 – The Admin Dashboard
Introduction
The WordPress Admin Dashboard is the control center of your website.
From here, you can manage the site’s appearance (front-end), create and edit content, monitor comments, manage users, and even adjust certain back-end settings (although this is not recommended unless you know what you’re doing).
Simply put, the dashboard is the heart of your WordPress site — it defines both the look and functionality of your project.
Basic Settings
Before you start creating content, it’s a good idea to adjust the basic settings.
Go to Settings → General and set the correct site name and description.
Then navigate to Settings → Permalinks — this is crucial for SEO and how your post URLs are generated.
Example:
If you’re building a pizza website and publish an article titled “How to Make a Margherita Pizza”,
your link might look like this by default:http://picaria.com/?p=123
But after configuring permalinks properly, it should look like this:http://picaria.com/how-to-make-a-margherita-pizza
Select the Post name option and save changes.
Creating a Page
The Pages section is used to create static pages — such as “About Us”, “Contact”, “Terms and Conditions”, etc.
Click Add New to create a new page.
Enter a title, for example “About Us”, and in the right sidebar, under Permalink, adjust the URL to be clear and simple, such as about-us.
📸 Image placeholder: creating a new page in WordPress
Featured Image
In the right-hand menu under Featured image, upload a main image for the page.
You can either upload a new file from your computer or select an existing one from the WordPress media library.
Page Content
The page content usually consists of well-structured text with headings, subheadings, lists, tables, and media elements.
To add content, click the blue + icon in the top left corner or the one in the middle of the page.
The left one shows all available blocks, while the middle one shows the most commonly used ones.
Add a few paragraphs, headings, and an image.
When finished, click Update in the top-right corner to save your changes.
📸 Image placeholder: Gutenberg editor showing content blocks being added
Posts
Posts are similar to pages, but they support categories and tags.
They’re used differently depending on the website type:
News site → for publishing news
Recipe site → for cooking recipes
Product site → for product descriptions
Blog → for articles
All posts can be grouped into categories for easier navigation.
Categories
Example: for a news site, categories might include “World”, “Education”, “Environment”.
For a pizza website — “Pizzas”, “Drinks”, “Desserts”.
Go to Posts → Categories, fill in the name and slug (in lowercase Latin letters).
This will determine how your URLs are structured.
📸 Image placeholder: WordPress form for creating a category
Static Homepage
By default, WordPress displays your latest posts on the homepage.
However, you can set a static page as your homepage if you prefer.
Create a page called “Home”.
Create another page for your blog posts — e.g., “Blog”, “News”, or “Recipes”.
Go to Settings → Reading and choose which page to display as the homepage and which one as the posts page.
Media Library
All uploaded images and videos can be found in the Media section.
It’s important that files are optimized for the web, as large uncompressed images can slow down your site.
WordPress automatically generates three image sizes (small, medium, large) for optimization.
However, if your site has thousands of posts, this can lead to many image files — so it’s good to plan your hosting capacity in advance.
Themes
Themes define the visual design of your website.
There are thousands of free and premium themes available.
When choosing a theme, always check:
Whether a demo version is available
How fast it loads
If there are any console errors
Whether the author/source is trustworthy
Free themes can be downloaded from wordpress.org/themes.
Premium themes can be purchased from themeforest.net — typically priced between $10 and $50.
📸 Image placeholder: WordPress theme selection screen
Creating your own theme is a great way to fully customize your site — and even earn from it.
For example, if you sell a theme for $20 and it sells 5,000 copies, that’s $100,000.
Yet another reason why learning WordPress development pays off.
Plugins
Plugins extend WordPress functionality.
There are over 50,000 free plugins available in the official directory.
A great example is WooCommerce, which turns a regular website into a full-featured online store.
Go to Plugins → Add New, search for “WooCommerce”, and you’ll see over 5 million active installations — proof of its popularity.
📸 Image placeholder: installing the WooCommerce plugin in WordPress
Users
In the Users section, you can add new members with different roles —
Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, or Subscriber.
This is especially useful if your site is managed by a team.
Conclusion
In this lesson, we explored the key features of the WordPress Admin Dashboard —
from creating pages and posts to installing themes and plugins.
In the next lesson, we’ll dive deeper into the WordPress theme structure and learn how to design our own.
📸 Image placeholder: WordPress dashboard overview with menus for Posts, Pages, Themes, and Plugins