So you’ve already installed WordPress. What to do now? At first, looking at the WordPress Dashboard may be intimidating. But with some practice, you’ll be navigating through all of its great features without a fuss.

So to kickstart your journey on WordPress, I’ll be covering 10 Features that you should be familiar with as a new member of WordPress.

Before we begin, please consider that this list does not intend to be comprehensive because WordPress has SO MUCH to offer compared to the list of features I’ll be covering in this blog.

Nonetheless, knowing these features should give you a good head start on your WordPress journey – Let’s begin!

#1 Upper Navigation Bar

The “upper navigation bar” is a black bar that goes across your screen. For the most part, the feature you should pay close attention to on the upper navigation bar is “Visit Site” – to get it, hover over your site’s name at the top left, and it should show the “Visit Site” button.

#2 WordPress Dashboard Widgets

On your WordPress Dashboard, you should see these five widgets:

• Site Health Status
• At a Glance
• Activity
• Quick Draft
• WordPress Events and News

A quick heads up! Depending on the plugins that you’ve installed to your WordPress dashboard, they may contain plugin-specific updates or other customized sections – hence creating an extra widget on your WordPress dashboard!

Site Health Status

The “site health status” box is the MOST IMPORTANT feature of your WordPress Dashboard. The reason being is because it tracks your website’s health and notifies you if your site has issues like PHP, Security Issues, and other problems that need your attention!

If your site health status is in orange or red, it means you have a problem with your SSL, Plugin, or Theme that needs to be installed or updated.

At a Glance

The “at a glance” widget shows you an overall number of all your pages, posts, and comments. Including your current WordPress version and the Theme you’re running.

Activity

The “activity” widget shows you the most recently published post and the most recent comments posted on your site. However, if you get spam comments, you mark them as spam by clicking the comments icon in the navigation bar at the top or mark them as spam from the widget itself.

Quick Draft

The “quick draft” widget is like a notepad – you can save as many drafts that you want. It’s so beneficial when you want to make a quick note for later!

WordPress Events and News

With the “WordPress events and news” widget, you’ll not only receive the top WordPress news from the community but also events that are nearby your set location!

#3 WordPress Page Editor

Moving onto the WordPress page editor, you’ll be spending most of your time building your website on the page editor. Navigate to Pages on the left-hand sidebar of your WordPress dashboard – then you should see on the left-hand side next to your sidebar a button called Add New.

By default, you will already have a home page ready-made. Just hover over the page, and underneath you should see Edit – Click it! Once you’ve clicked on Edit, you should see editor:

The page editor is easy to work on, just like editing a document on Microsoft Word or GoogleDocs. But if the WordPress page editor is not enough for you and you plan on getting an even better page editor/builder, I highly recommend you visit our blog – Is The Divi Builder Worth It? (Review) To help you decide!

#4 WordPress Code Editor

By default, the WordPress visual editor is used to create or edit posts and pages. However, if you are comfortable with coding, you can make changes using the code editor too! Click the Text button beside Visual to display the code editor.

As a beginner, this feature may have no use. But it’s still credible for users that are:

• Advanced and comfortable with making code-based changes
• Learning HTML by seeing how other pages look displayed in text
• Using the code editor to diagnose the issue manually
• Make content easier to read and understand by people and search engine spiders

#5 Quick Edit

When making quick changes to your page or post, you want to make those changes within seconds. Depending on the changes you wish to make, here’s a list of changes the quick edit feature has:

• Title
• Slug
• Date
• Author
• Password or Private post box
• Categories
• Tags
• Allow Comments
• Allow Pings
• Status
• Make this post sticky

To find the quick edit feature, you can navigate to Pages or Posts – then hover over the title of the page or post you want to edit. Once you’re hovering over the page or post, you should see the quick edit feature!

Click it, and this is what you see:

#6 Media Library

The media library hosts all of your files to build your website. You can access your media library on the left-hand side of your screen – you should see Media.

However, you can not only access it from the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard but also within WordPress’s unique editing features! Inside the media library, you can click on any image or video and copy its URL if you want to code it to your site manually.

#7 Revision History

Made an oopsy? No worries, the revision history feature is here to save the day! To restore the previous version of your site, navigate to the Publish Box with the Publish Button, and above the button – you should see this.

Click Browse that’s right next to the number of revisions as shown, and it should bring you to this page!

Depending on how many changes you made, for example: If you made two changes to your site, click the Previous Button twice to move two steps back to the fixed version of your site. Then click the Restore This Version Button.

#8 Scheduling Posts

The best feature that active bloggers love is scheduling their posts to go live at specific times! The post-schedule feature is also useful when you work with a team that may need access to review your post before it goes live on your site.

You’ll find the feature in your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to Posts and click the Add New button. After creating a new post, navigate to the Publish box.

Inside the publish box, you should see this:

Now what you need to do next is click Edit and set your date & time. After setting up your date & time, press OK – then you should see the Publish button change to Schedule. Click the Schedule button, and you should be able to see your scheduled post updates on the summary page!

#9 Permalinks

Permalinks are essential when creating content on your website! Users would most likely use the permalink feature because it selects another option, such as post names, which results in a more readable keyword-rich URL.

To use permalinks, you must be on a page where the page editor is. Once you’re in the page editor, you can highlight any piece of text in the page editor. After highlighting the text, click the chain icon and paste the URL.

#10 Custom Dashboard Widgets

For this WordPress feature, you can customize your dashboard with widgets of your own by downloading any necessary plugins! A majority of plugins come with a dashboard widget that you can enable.

You can get these dashboard widgets from plugins like Yoast SEO, Analytify, Jetpack, Google Site Kit, and MORE!…

Conclusion

Although WordPress has SO MANY features that are easy to absorb, it still requires time to master. In addition, always keep an eye out for new features, tools, tips, and tricks to grow your experience with WordPress so you can work more efficiently!

What’s your favorite WordPress feature? Tell us in the comments!