Wordpress Dashboard Plugins
Hollie Kipps
Fortunately, there are plugins that let you change and improve the admin dashboard to help it better meet your needs. These plugins can help you customize the look of your dashboard, make it easier to use, and add new features to make managing your site simpler.
Advanced smart filtering and sorting: With Admin Columns, you can filter and sort your data with ease, making it simpler to manage large amounts of content, including posts, pages, and custom post types. You can apply multiple filters at a time and even save filter combinations for future use.
Plugin integrations: Admin Columns integrates seamlessly with many popular plugins such as Advanced Custom Fields, enabling you to display and manage custom data directly from your list tables and allowing for a more unified admin experience.
WP Custom Admin Interface is a user-friendly plugin used by WordPress site administrators to create a more personalized and efficient admin experience by customizing the admin menu, toolbar, and admin and login interfaces.
Pricing: The basic version of the plugin is free, but they also offer a pro version that gives you more flexibility and additional features, such as the ability to create multiple menus, toolbars, and notices. The paid version starts from $39 for a one-year license for one website or $29 if you subscribe.
Admin Menu Editor is a straightforward plugin designed to help WordPress users customize the admin menu to suit their workflow and preferences. It allows for the reorganization, renaming, hiding, or deletion of menu items, making the admin dashboard more intuitive and less cluttered for each user.
Role-based access: Set up custom menu items visible only to specific user roles so they see only the tools and options relevant to their tasks. This feature is only available in the Pro version.
Ultimate Dashboard is a plugin aimed at simplifying the WordPress backend, transforming it into a more user-friendly and less distracting workspace. It specializes in customizing the dashboard area, allowing users to replace the default widgets with their own or to completely streamline the dashboard for a cleaner look.
Widget management: Remove unwanted widgets and create custom ones for your dashboard, including text, HTML, and even icons, to provide quick access to information or functionalities important to your workflow.
Multisite support: Offers tools and features specifically designed for WordPress Multisite installations, allowing admins to control the dashboard experience across your network. This feature is only available in the pro version.
Pricing: UiPress offers a free version and premium plans starting at $49/year for one site. Premium functionality includes advanced controls, additional widgets, and priority support.
The WordPress admin dashboard is crucial for managing your site effectively, and the plugins we just showed are truly the best at doing that. Share with us your personal favorites in the comment section below!
Among the different options, Admin Columns stands out for those seeking to customize their WordPress admin area for better data management. It offers flexible columns, advanced filtering and sorting, inline and bulk editing, and powerful exporting capabilities, making it an invaluable tool for site owners.
Aside from changing the design of your website and managing the content, you can also edit post categories, create footer and header links, customize navigation menus, create permalink structures, and even hide dashboard elements if you are creating a site for a client.
WP Adminify is a powerful plugin that allows you to customize and optimize your WordPress dashboard. Whether you want to change the look and feel of your admin panel, organize your media and post types, edit your menu items, or create your dashboard widgets, WP Adminify has got you covered.
Using WP Adminify, you can transform your WordPress client dashboard with white label branding, dark mode, admin notice, login customizer, admin page, admin columns, media folders, admin menu editor, custom dashboard widget, and many more. WP Adminify is the ultimate solution for a custom admin panel that enhances your experience with precision and style.
This plugin lets you change the appearance and functionality of your admin panel with various modules, such as UI customization, login customizer, media folder, admin columns, custom admin page, and custom dashboard widget. You can enable or disable modules per need. You can also edit, rearrange, and add custom menu items and admin columns on your Dashboard. WP Adminify plugin gives you the ultimate control and flexibility over your WordPress client dashboard.
The Ultra WordPress Admin Theme plugin comes with 34 ready-to-use admin themes and the option to create a fully custom one. You can choose a different font, add a logo, and even use a background image on the sidebar. This plugin also gives you the ability to create a custom login page.
Built using the Laravel 8.0 framework, the SmartEnd CMS plugin gives you total control over your admin dashboard and also makes it possible to easily access and modify key functions using Restful APIs. Backend features include secure dashboard logins, the ability to add custom fields to any section, user permissions controls, and SEO modules for every page.
A regular license for SmartEnd costs $35. While the total number of installations is lower than some of the other plugins on our list, this admin assistant has been receiving consistent updates for the past five years.
Ultimate Dashboard allows you to create a clean, simple WordPress control panel for either yourself or your clients. You can customize the dashboard by removing widgets and creating custom admin pages.
With this plugin, you can organize the WordPress content management panels with beautiful columns to make it look organized and user-friendly. You can easily filter content and navigate pages with advanced, customized columns that list specific information about that page or post.
This plugin is ideal for those with large websites or a complicated inventory of products. But you can use it for anything, including assigning priority badges to your pages and color-coding your posts.
With this plugin, you can create a hyper-customized dashboard for either yourself or your clients. You can choose colors with a color-picker, pick custom icons for menu items, and change the WordPress logo in the top left.
More than 1 million users have installed this plugin for easy access to Google Analytics metrics directly from their dashboard. Just a few clicks are all it takes to set up accurate analytics tracking that delivers real-time data directly to your WordPress admin page.
Managing user permissions is important when creating a WordPress website for a client or when giving access to multiple users. Though WordPress has a built-in process for editing user roles, you can make even more granular changes with a dedicated user role plugin.
Adminimize is a useful WordPress admin plugin for multi-author WordPress blogs or for client websites. This plugin helps you hide items from the WordPress dashboard, restricting access as necessary and preventing unwanted changes.
User Role Editor is an extremely easy plugin to use. Simply turn on "checkboxes" to grant admin permissions. For example, if you want to allow a contributor to add media files, you can easily do that by checking the box for that permission.
When I install them it says they're installed, and when I click "activate plugin" it says theres no valid header for the plugin. Navigating to the main plugin section in the dashboard the plugin doesn't show up at all, so I can't activate it from the main plugin page either.
The top of your Plugin's main PHP file must contain a standard Plugin information header. This header lets WordPress recognize that your Plugin exists, add it to the Plugin management screen so it can be activated, load it, and run its functions; without the header, your Plugin will never be activated and will never run. Here is the header format:
If I had to guess, I'd say the problem is that the Plugin Name header is missing from the top of the plugin's main file. Not knowing what plugins you're using, this is the most complete answer I can give right now.
I should add that in order for a file to be checked for headers, it must be a .php file either in the plugins directory or in a subdirectory of the plugins directory. So, for example, wp-content/plugins/plugin.php and wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/plugin.php would be valid, but wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/lib/file.php would not.
I have created online store in word press. I logged in to admin panel with my admin login and i have verified that login is having admin rights also. Now,I want to change banner image and some font color but I can't see plugin and appearance tab in sidebar.please help. screenshot of the admin panel
An issue that some users have mentioned is that when they have entered their WordPress admin panel that they have been unable to locate their plugins menu from within the dashboard. This should appear about half way down the menu on the left of the screen below appearance and should have an icon that looks a little like a domestic plug. However for multisite users you may have to login as network admin to view this tab.
See if the following exists: -admin/plugins.php (where you shouldreplace example.com with the name of your site. If this does notexist then it is missing from your theme and needs to be replaced oryou should swap your theme.
Note: if you want to shim this in to an existing installation just mv the plugins and themes from your previous release (/srv/www/example.com/releases/[release -1]/web/app/[plugins/themes]/*) into the newly created /srv/www/example.com/shared/[themes/plugins]/ directories after deploy.
I was looking for a way to keep my composer plugins just as is, plus giving the client ability to add plugins by themselves. Something like:
Plugins added through admin -> goes in shared/plugins
Plugins added through composer -> goes in web/app/plugins as normal.