Your WordPress Dashboard A Waste Of Space?

One of the things I almost always see when I log into somebody’s WordPress admin is…

… a bunch of garbage.

What do I mean? Well, it is that big admin dashboard. The screen you immediately see when you log in. And what’s usually on that thing?

Widgets. Stupid, useless widgets. Like “WordPress News” and the “Quick Draft”. Has anybody EVER used that stupid “Quick Draft”?! 🤪

Now, I removed all that crap from my own site a long time ago. But, I have also put a decent amount of work into fully customizing my admin dashboard to suit my own needs. In fact, last week, I coded up a few new additions I thought would be useful.

So, I wanted to talk about this. And that is the theme of this week’s issue. So, let’s dive in.

Make Your WordPress Dashboard Your Own

The WordPress Dashboard when you log into WP-Admin is like your “homepage” as your site owner. But, for most people, it is a complete waste of space.

Plugins drop all kinds of garbage on there. There’s “news” feeds from sites we don’t even care about. There’s that stupid “Quick Draft” thing that literally nobody uses. 😜

But, I think it is worth it to take some time to make your dashboard useful. Not just to hide stuff which is annoying, but to add stuff which actually makes your site and business management easier. Here is what my own Admin Dashboard looks like currently…

What I have on my own dashboard is:

• A list of upcoming appointments that were scheduled with Fluent Booking
• A revenue graph for the last 30 days
• The standard WooCommerce dashboard widget
• Wp Armour Anti-Spam, so I can see how many bots are being shut down on my forms
• A weekly graph for Anytime Credit debits
• Conversions being tracked by Conversion Bridge
• A list of active Concierge clients, credit balances, and links to all major admin screens for them (like FluentCRM profile, user profile, and credit history)

There’s not a single default widget on my dashboard. Because frankly, I find all the standard ones to be useless. They don’t help me day to day, so why the hell keep them there? So, I don’t.

My goal with my dashboard is to make it a screen which is actually useful for managing my business day to day. I want it to save me time, reduce clicks to get to things I use all the time, and make my life easier.

And I think it is worth some of YOUR time to take charge of your own WordPress admin dashboard in order to make it your own. Stop letting plugin developers stuff their garbage on there. Stop making the dashboard a screen which is so full of crap that you just ignore it.

Of course, the next question is…. how. 😇 So, we’ll cover that a little more below…

This Week In Concierge

Last week was a busy one. Quite a few calls with clients, but also shows what a variety of things I often end up doing for Concierge clients. Some of which was:

• Helping a couple clients get connected up with Bunny.net for delivery of videos as well as private MP3 files
• Programmed a custom shortcode for a member dashboard with drip content delivery to grey out and disable lesson modules before they’re released.
• Fixed a client’s DMARC monitoring for email deliverability
• Transitioned SEO plugins for a client moving out of RankMath
• Fixing a landing page to properly integrate Stealth Seminar registration into WordPress
• Began process of converting a TutorLMS site over to Learndash
• Debugged a pre-screening process before a call booking
• Set up an age gate for a client in the cigar business

Every client is different. And Concierge means I become their partner for all things “tech”… whether it is inside WordPress or not.

Not to mention I often end up in an advisory role as well so as to help clients determine the best path forward.

Concierge is never dull. 😎

WordPress Quick Bits

A2 Hosting Gets Gobbled Up. A2 hosting has been acquired by a private-equity conglomerate called World Host Group. WHG owns other brands such as DollarHost, DotEasy and others. The company owns hosts throughout the world, so this acquisition seems mostly about expanding their data center reach into the USA.

Divi 5 Public Alpha 7. Elegant Themes has released the public alpha version 7 for the upcoming Divi 5 release. Looks like they’re coming along nicely in their long-term plan to catch up to all the other page builders. 🤪

GenerateBlocks Is Sticking To Gutenberg. Ian Svoboda, a developer at GeneratePress, was on a podcast and confirmed they are not building a page builder, but definitely sticking as close to WordPress core as possible. Like Kadence (which I use), GenerateBlocks works directly with the core blocks builder.

Better Find and Replace Security Bug. If you’re a user of the Better Find and Replace plugin, be sure to upgrade. According to this Patchstack security report, versions previous to 1.6.8 had a privilege escalation vulnerability.

Fastest Web Hosts Over 3 Years. WP Shout has published a pretty in-depth report where they tested 15 different web hosts over the course of 3 years to see who the fastest was. It is a pretty in-depth post, but they are concluding that Rocket and Flywheel were the most consistently fast hosts. Of the “cheap” web hosts, they found that Namecheap is the fastest. Interesting.

Uncanny Automator 6.2. Uncanny Automator 6.2 was released. This version offers integrations with Threads, additional plugin integrations, Stripe triggers and numerous other enhancements. Check out the blog post here.

QuickLink Pro. Jonathan Williams has released a new plugin called QuickLinks Pro. Allows you to set up a custom list of external links that you use a lot in your content and then quickly insert them into your content using the block editor. Looks like a real time-saver. If you’ve had to open up a new browser tab to go manually fetch some link to paste into your content, then you’ll see the value of this one.

Elementor 3.27. Lately, been seeing some issues with recent Elementor upgrades breaking things temporarily. But, that doesn’t stop the upgrade train. Version 3.27 brings flexible grids, support for Youtube Shorts, some performance and security enhancements, etc. Check out the announcement here.

Oh Snap! BuddyBoss Migration To FluentCommunity! This one is going to be valuable. The new 1.1.20 release of FluentCommunity Pro apparently has a built-in option to migrate OUT of BuddyBoss. I’m really happy to see this. I’ll need to test it, but it will be nice to have an exit ramp to offer for people feeling trapped in BuddyBoss.

Matt Centralizes Control Over WordCamp Sponsors. Looks like Matt is continuing to clamp down his control over the WordPress ecosystem by now needing to personally approve all sponsors to WordCamp worldwide. Check out the announcement.

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How To Customize Your Dashboard

There are various things that go into creating the dashboard you want. Some of them are easy and some of them require custom coding. But, let me give you some tips here…

First, I always use the Admin and Site Enhancements plugin (included in the Concierge Toolkit) to disable numerous dashboard widgets. It outright shuts off the code for them, so they’re not even there. Some of the ones I always turn off are Activity, “At A Glance”, any “news” widget from any plugin, Quick Draft, Site Health Status, WordPress News, etc.

Note that you can also use the “Screen Options” dropdown at the top right of your Dashboard to disable widgets. That works, but the code is still in there. Using the ASE plugin, those widgets are just… gone.

Next, you want to drag and drop the widgets you’re keeping into places you want them so that they’re not all going down one column and looking stupid. 😇

In terms of number of columns, WordPress defaults to 4 columns and automatically reduces it depending on the screen size. If you’d like to specify a column count, you could use a plugin to do that (such as Dashboard Columns), or you can put in a little code snippet into your snippets plugin (I use FluentSnippets).

You could also go hog-wild and use something like Ultimate Dashboard or Adminify and take full control over everything. Some of these plugins could have adverse effects, so test first.

But, it is one thing to just turn off the widgets you don’t want. It is another to ADD widgets you specifically want. Every business is different and has different needs. The widgets I put on my dashboard are quite specific to MY business. You’re not going to find some plugin out there that lists out Concierge clients. 🤪

This is when you get into custom coding.

Yes, it requires some knowledge of PHP code. But, it is certainly a lot easier to pull off these days using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and others.

While I do have some skill when it comes to PHP, I definitely used ChatGPT to assist in creating custom code for my admin dashboard. I’ve also used ChatGPT as a tool for creating custom stuff for clients when the need arises.

Now, it is important to know that ChatGPT isn’t perfect. You can’t just tell it what you want and it spits it out. But, it sure does help. What I find is that it can often get me 80% of the way and then I depend on my own knowledge to get me the other 20% of the way.

But, as an example, Fluent Booking currently doesn’t have a dashboard widget available for upcoming appointments. I’ve suggested it to them, but it doesn’t exist yet. They have a nice shortcode for the site front-end, but not one for the admin area. I wanted one, so I coded it. 😎

I used ChatGPT to code it. I had to also use some inspection of the database structure and some other things to guide it along. But, I managed to get it done.

With my Concierge widget, I also used ChatGPT to code it. This one makes use of the FluentCRM tags and some WPFusion functions to query out clients from my database. Interestingly, WP Fusion and FluentCRM both gave great documentation. I could even tell ChatGPT to look at those websites to determine how to code what I needed. Again, it took some massaging, but I got it done.

Yes, it can take a little technical knowledge to fully customize your dashboard, but AI tools can help make it easier to create your own, personal dashboard widgets that are specific to your business.

For all Concierge clients, if you have something in mind for your own dashboard, let me know and perhaps I can help you create it.

But, remember…. WordPress is incredibly customizable. You can tweak and mold that thing to your exact needs. And I think a big part of doing that is first realizing that you CAN. So many people are so used to just accepting whatever is presented to them, but WordPress is unique in the fact that pretty much everything about it can be changed.

It is just a matter of taking charge. 😎