how to Manage WordPress Website
Lesson - 4
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Managing the backend settings of your WordPress website involves handling various configurations to ensure your site operates optimally. Here’s a guide on how to effectively manage these settings:
How To Create Custom Menus
Far now we have learnt everything about creating a post and page on a WordPress website. Now we will see how to create a menu on a WordPress website.
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Menus are the most important layout of any website, it helps your visitor to navigate your site and its content smoothly.
To create a navigational menu, go to Appearance » Menus in your WordPress admin dashboard.
Then you need to provide a name for your menu, like ‘Top Navigation Menu’ and then click the ‘Create Menu’ button. This will expand the menu area, and it will look like this:
From the left section, you can choose the page, post, or categories, or you can create a custom link for your menu, click the box next to each of the pages you want to add, and then click on the ‘Add to Menu’ button.
Once your pages have been added, you can move them around by dragging and dropping them.
After arranging the pages, select the location where you want to display the menu and click on the ‘Save Menu’ button.
The primary menu is located in the website’s main menu area, i.e. the header; and the footer menu is located in the website’s footer.
Creating Drop-Down Menus in WordPress
A drop-down menu is also known as a sub-menu or a nested menu. It’s like when you bring your cursor over a parent item, all the child items will appear beneath it in a sub-menu.
To create a submenu, drag an item below the parent item, and then drag it slightly to the right as you can see in the below example.
You can even add multiple layers to the dropdown menu but it may end up looking a bit messy.
How to Add and Use Widgets in WordPress
Widgets are blocks that you can place on your WordPress site to add different functionality and features.
Generally, it’s used to add things like galleries, archives, quotes, categories, popular posts, Facebook like boxes, and other dynamic items on a WordPress site.
To add a widget, go to the Appearance » Widgets page in your admin area.
On the right side of this page, you will see all the widget areas where you can place the widgets. These areas will be defined by the WordPress theme you are using.
If you are using the Astra theme you will get so many widget areas (as shown in the above example).
To add widgets to the space available in your WordPress theme. The easiest one is to simply drag and drop them to your sidebar.
To display Google Ads in the sidebar, you should drag the HTML widget and put Adsense code in it.
Widgets are an incredibly powerful and flexible tool in WordPress. WordPress developers have been using them in many innovative ways. So do you.
How to Moderate Comments in WordPress
WordPress comes with fantastic built-in comment features so that you can interact with the community around your content.
By using the comment section your website visitors can add their input on a specific article that you had written, ask questions, and provide feedback.
You can see all the comments by visiting the comments section in your admin panel.
On the comments page, on the top, you will see 6 different tabs (all, mine, pending, approved, spam, and trash).
Once someone submits a comment, it will be held for moderation (depending on the settings) for you to approve or delete. This allows you to control what appears on your website.
You can also reply to a comment by clicking on the reply link. Replying to a comment automatically approves the comment as well.
Anyone with a valid Name and Email can leave a comment without verifying their identity.
Since WordPress allows anyone to leave comments on your website, a few spammers start commenting numerous spammy comments on your post.
There are a few various clues you can use to determine whether or not a remark is spam:
- Comments with a bunch of links, keywords, and strange characters
- Comment with a Fake Name
- Generic Comments
If you see a comment that looks or feels spammy, then you can mark it as Spam or delete it permanently.
Comment Settings Configuration
To update comment settings, go to Settings » Discussion there you will find different sections, and we will walk you through each option of the page one by one.
1. Default Post Settings – It is divided into three options. The first option attempt to notify any blog linked to from the post, the second will let you know about pingbacks and trackbacks, and the third setting allows people to post comments on the new articles.
2. Other Comment Settings – From this section, you can control how visitors will comment on your blog post, and what details they have to fill in before posting any comment.
There is also an option to require users to register to your site before leaving a comment however in our opinion it’s not necessary for most sites.
3. Email Me Whenever – By enabling this option, whenever a new comment is made or if the comment is held for moderation you will get notified.
4. Before A Comment Appears – Make sure this box is checked so that no comment can appear on your site without your approval.
5. Comment Moderation & Disallowed Comment– Since you have already set your comments to be manually approved, all your comments will go to the moderation queue regardless of how many links they have.
However, here you can add keywords, names, URLs, emails or even IPs to filter comments into the moderation queue or put those comments in the trash automatically.
Turn Comments On/Off for Specific Posts in WordPress
Sometimes web owners don’t want comments to be enabled on some posts. Keeping that in mind WordPress comes with a feature that allows you to turn comments off for single posts or pages.
To do so, simply go to edit a post and on the post editor screen scroll down to the Discussion meta box. There you can uncheck the box next to the ‘Allow comments’ option.
How to Add New Users and Authors to Your WordPress Blog
There are 3 ways to add new users to your WordPress website.
- You can add users manually
- Let users register themselves for free
- Create a paid membership site where users pay to register
Manually Adding a New User or Author to Your Website
For that, you simply need to go to the Users » Add New page in your WordPress admin area.
A form page will open where you can fill in all the details of the user.
Start with the username (username can’t be easily changed later) Next, enter the user’s email address.
After that, you can enter the first name, last name, and website URL. Since these are optional fields, you can also leave them blank. Later users can edit these details from their profile at any time.
Lastly, generate the password and to send the notification to the user to let them know how to log in, click on the checkbox provided below the password field. This notification email will also have a link, so they can set a different password if they want.
Before adding a new user, provide a role to them from the dropdown list.
Each user role comes with a different set of capabilities. Subscriber is the least powerful role, and Administrator is the most powerful role.
So choose the user role very carefully (later in this post we have explained the users’ role)
Open Your WordPress Site for Anyone to Register for Free
If you have to add a few users then you can do it manually by using the above method but what if you want to let users register on your site for free?
Well in that case you need to adjust a small setting in your WordPress admin panel.
For that go to Settings » General and check the ‘Anyone can register’ box.
As you can see by default WordPress adds new users as subscribers, you can go ahead and change the default user role using that dropdown.
However, make sure you understand what you’re doing. We also advise that people only register as Subscribers, rather than using Administrator as the default role.
create a paid membership site where users pay to register
If you are running a website that consists of premium content then you can ask the user to register themself as paid users to access those content.
To do this, you need a WordPress membership plugin like Memberpress.
MemberPress plugin lets you lock specific posts and pages on your site so that only paid users can access them. You can also divide users into different access levels according to the plan they choose. It’s the same way we buy hosting for a website.
In fact, a members-only area is one of the best ways to make money from your website.
Understanding User Roles in WordPress
WordPress comes with these default user roles:
• Administrator
• Editor
• Author
• Contributor
• Subscriber
However, you may see some additional user roles if you will install a few plugins. For instance, WooCommerce adds ‘Customer’ and ‘Shop Manager’ roles.
1. Administrator – The administrator user has full access to the website. They can install plugins, change themes, delete content, and even add or delete other users.
You should only assign the administrator role to the user whom you fully trust.
2. Editor – They are allowed to add, edit, or delete their own and other people’s posts. But they cannot access core website settings, neither they can access other admin features like theme and plugin.
3. Author – Authors are allowed to edit, add, and publish their own posts but they can’t edit or publish other people’s posts or access features like plugins, themes, settings, and tools.
4. Contributor – Contributors can edit and add their own posts but they can’t publish them. Neither do they upload media files such as images nor they can access the administrative power of a website.
5. Subscribers – Subscribers can only create their profile on your website so that they can receive the latest notification, emails, offers etc. The subscriber’s role does not let users add or edit posts in any way
Managing Users in WordPress
As an administrator, you can edit, update, add or entirely remove any users from your website.
For that, you have to visit the Users tab from your WordPress admin area.
There you can edit anything (password, name, email, role, profile pic etc) of any user except the username.
How to create a static homepage
The homepage is the front page of the website, when someone visits your site by entering your domain name in their browser’s address bar, first of all, they will see the homepage. It gives an overall idea about your website or business.
By default, WordPress shows your blog post on the homepage with a generic sidebar. This is not good as it only shows a few of your current articles.
If you run a business website or even a blogging website you should revamp the homepage so that your visitors can easily explore other pages and content on your site.
To create a custom homepage you have two options:
1. Use WordPress built-in functionality, Gutenberg, to create a custom home page
2. Create a Custom Homepage by using Page Builders
Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress using Gutenberg
By using Gutenberg a block-based editor you can create a beautiful layout for your WordPress homepage.
It uses blocks for each content element which enables you to organize content blocks to create a page structure that you like.
You can easily insert buttons, videos, pricing table, gallery, and cover image and customize each of the blocks to meet your design requirement.
Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress using Page Builders
A page builder allows you to create a beautiful page layout by using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
I recommend Elementor because it’s very easy to use and comes with so many pre-built layouts and widgets.
Once installed you can import the prebuilt templates and replace the content with your own content. If-fact you can extend the template by adding more modules, widgets, and sections.
Or else you can start building a fresh page layout from the scratch it’s very easy to do that.
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