Those of us who are using WordPress to run businesses don’t want to waste time in our WordPress admin panels with a bunch of clutter from plugin companies and stuff like that. We want to customize the dashboard so that it’s actually respectful of our time and gives us exactly what we need in the right way, in the right spot, and as quickly as possible. So in this video, I want to share with you a few ways that I’ve customized my own admin panel in order to turn WordPress into my own business command center. Before we dive in, I just wanted to mention a few of the ways that I look at this overall thing, and that is that WordPress is ours to bend to our will. We can ultimately turn it into what we want. It’s an incredibly modifiable platform. The other thing, too, that you need to keep in mind is that it’s not just plugins that other people built that you can actually tack onto your WordPress site. You can actually build your own plugin. It’s not as hard as you might think. But also you’ve got code snippets and plugins designed to modify the admin panel, to hide notifications, to clean up the dashboard.

All things will go over here really briefly, that you could turn the WordPress Admin Panel into what you want. Now, why would you even want to do that? Well, a business is basically a combination of systems. There’s step-by-step things that we do in order to hopefully get some type of predictable outcome, with the goal being that we make money from it. Now, if we’re wasting time clicking on things in order to find data, or we don’t have access to certain data, that gets in the way. They represent constraints on the system. And as an executive, as a business owner, you’re looking to alleviate constraints and make the systems run with more streamlined of a nature, right? So that’s the way that I look at WordPress. The other thing, too, is that my business is operating on WordPress. I don’t have a a bunch of separate systems out there that somehow I’m trying to cobble together with zappure. Com or something like that. It’s almost exclusively inside the WordPress. So WordPress is where the action is happening. Why can’t I pull the data that I want right out of that place too, and display it all right there inside of WordPress so that for most things that I have to do in my business, I literally don’t have to leave WordPress.

The data is there, the database is there, and WordPress is just a big old pile of a PHP code that we run on top of it, and we can add our own when it’s necessary and modify how the thing looks, works, and things like that. So what I’m going to do in this video is I’m just going to show you some of the things that I’ve done with my own Admin Panel to make it more custom to myself. It says it’s not necessarily going to be a how-to video in every single one. Some of them are easy because you can just use a plugin to do it. Other ones not, like custom development of a plugin. But I will say with the use of AI, it is getting easier to do that. All right, so let’s jump in. All right, so the first thing you’re going to want to do is take control of your dashboard inside of WP Admin. Most people have a bunch of useless garbage on the dashboard, like the quick draft and the news feeds from Elementor and WordPress news and stuff that nobody ever looks at. So why are we wasting our time?

The WordPress dashboard inside of WP Admin is actually one of the most useful pieces of real estate that you have. It’s what you see immediately when you log into the Admin panel. So why waste it with shit that other people put there when you could use it for stuff that’s actually useful to you? All right? Just put it bluntly like that. So what we see here is my own dashboard. Obviously, some things are a list of clients and stuff, so we’ll blur that stuff out. But these are custom dashboard widgets on my dashboard. But the first thing before we discuss that is to hide stuff. Now, the plugin that I use for that is Admin and Site Enhancements. This one is one that I use for various changes to my dashboard. It’s incredibly useful. I also use it on a lot of client sites. And one of the things that we can do when we go over to our enhancements area, let’s go over to enhancements. All right, we go to the Admin interface and we do the Disable Dashboard Widgets. And you can see that I’ve got that one turned on and I got all kinds of stuff checked off just so that I don’t You have to see it.

This latest update stuff on WordPress from this company here, the quick draft, who the hell ever uses a quick draft? Another latest news at a glance. Anything that you are not using When you’re using day to day, you might as well just turn it off and get it out of your face. It’s a waste of time. The other thing you could do… See, this area will literally just disable the code. It’s just not going to show up anymore. However, you can also go to your dashboard and and go down to the screen options drop-down in the top right over here, and you can disable stuff right here as well. So don’t forget that those two options are there. And I highly recommend that you hide all the garbage. It’s a waste of your time. Next up, once you’ve hidden the trash, is you want to put stuff on the dashboard that’s actually useful to you. Now, a lot of the stuff on my dashboard is custom, okay? There are a few things down here at the bottom, like Fluent Forms, Object Cache I’ll probably just hide that one now that I think about it because I really don’t look at it.

The Conversions, which just will test conversion events across the site. This is coming in from the Conversion Bridge plugin, which is really cool. But everything WPR But everything north of that is all custom stuff that I’ve developed specific to my business. So some of the options that I’ve done here are a Revenue Widget instead of the WU Commerce one that’s built right in that doesn’t really provide anything anything of value. I just made my own, which gave me the big three numbers, which is current MRR, which is basically my monthly recurring revenue, subscription revenue for the month, the total revenue for the month so far, and then the total revenue for last month, basically, so I can make a comparison. Those are the big three numbers. South of that, we’ve got a graph of the last 30 days of Woocommerce revenue. South of that one, I’ve got one for Fluent CRM, the number of subscribers and the number of unsubscribed every single day. So I can always compare the numbers and see if we’re getting a net gain or a net loss. And then I’ve got one for any time credit debit. So when I debit people’s accounts, I now have a graph of basically how many credits per week I’m actually deducting.

I can Consider that a stat of basically value of services delivered in the business. So as an executive, that’s super useful. Now, this one is a list of my clients, and it comes in actually… These are all concierge clients, and it comes in from Fluent CRM. It is part of a custom plugin. I’ll talk about that more in a minute. But the reason I tell you these things is not like, Okay, here’s the code. It’s basically, I thought about the things that I needed, and I built them. Now, these widgets, a lot of them We’re actually sitting inside of Fluent Snippets, which is my preferred code manager. There’s other ones out there. But I use Fluent Snippets myself, and basically, I created the code to create those graphs on the dashboard. Now, if you don’t have the skills to do that, and I have some skills, but I didn’t want to take too long to figure this stuff out, I just used AI to do it. So in this case, I probably use either GRONK or ChatGPT. Those are the two that I use most often. And I basically said, Hey, I’m looking to create a dashboard widget that does such and such, and the thing would create it.

Now for Fluent CRM, it was a little bit more work because I needed to tell it information about the data structure and all these kinds of stuff. But for Woocommerce, that one was pretty easy. I did have to finetune some stuff, but working with AI is a different skill. But the point is, I was able to create those widgets, drop them on there. It turns it into a widget that I can then pop on the dashboard, and it’s specific to me, and that was really important. The next thing that I customized to my own needs was Fluent CRM itself. Now, not everybody uses Fluent CRM, but I’m a really large fan of this for multiple reasons, one of which is that it’s customizable. And I can turn this CRM into basically my dream CRM that when I was using third-party solutions, I wish that I had. Now, there are certain tabs that show up in here when you have certain plugins installed. So for example, the purchase history will show up if you’re running one of the integrated plugins like Woocommerce. And I can see people’s purchase history all right there in one spot. Form submissions will be all their form submissions from Fluent Forms.

I don’t use notes and activities a whole heck of a lot. Book Bookings would be their entire appointment schedule, of course, coming in from Fluent Booking. The Journey tab is basically customer journeys and conversion events tied to this particular person, and it’s coming in from Conversion Bridge. Conversion Bridge plugin drops that into Fluent CRM, and it’s a really cool feature. Then I have one that I’ve built myself called Credits, where I can look at people’s anytime credits right there inside their profile. You can see over here to the side, I have a thing for concierge site. Basically, I have a plugin that allows me to manage site profiles for people, for my clients in the concierge program. And if they have a site profile tied to their profile, it’ll show up right here. And then if I click on that, this is going to, of course, be going to mine, but I could show up with the information to their profile in terms of various links to different things, admin notes about it, their site set up, like what their host is and all this type of stuff. I don’t store passwords in here because that’s not a smart thing to do inside of a WordPress site.

But this other information I do, and it allows me to manage site profiles to keep track of certain things all inside the local database. Now, that gets us into the whole subject of custom plugins, and I do have two. Well, actually, I’ve got three, but one of them is not really ready for prime time yet, so I’m not really going to mention it. However, we’ve got the Anytime Credits Manager, which is a custom plugin that manages my credit system on my website. And basically, what it does is it It allows me to look at people’s balances, to look at their entire log. So if I open up this one, I can look at the entire log across everybody of both purchases and debits. And then they can see the same thing when they log in to their account profile. They could see the same exact log for themselves, whereas I can see it for everybody. And then I have another screen that lists out anybody on my site that happens to have a non-zero credit balance. And it allows me to just jump through here and then quickly jump into their profile. That’s very useful as well.

I can also search for them by email or what have you and drop right into their profile. That’s a super handy function as well. The other plugin that I have is for managing… Where is it? The Concierge Client Manager. Now, again, this is just me. It’s just for the Concierge program in-house. Therefore, this is not a plugin that you’re going to find out there in the repository. But basically, what this one does is it allows me to manage client websites the site profiles that I just showed you a bit ago, as well as pop up a list of all concierge clients. It’s not just on that dashboard, but also in a dedicated list, and it will show a little bit more information as well. So that’s what I’ve done with those. Now, to talk about creating a custom plugin, that’s obviously a pretty large topic. I will say that I do have some programming background, but I most definitely used AI to help me out because it radically sped up the entire process. I I think with both of these plugins, I started out doing it a little bit more piecemeal with ChatGPT, but then eventually I started using a tool called CURSOR, which is basically a programming development with AI baked right into it.

That is a massive time saver, that tool. A whole another thing, but it’s definitely beyond the scope of this video to talk about how to use CURSOR. But I did create these two. Frankly, these are pretty basic plugins that I created. They’re not even all that fancy, but they suit my needs. And the cool thing is, is that when I develop, oh, I got a new thing that would be really helpful for me to have, I could just modify the plugin, and I’ve got that capability. The cool thing is that these are plugins, so it’s a separate thing of code. It’s not code that’s dropped into Fluent Snippets or something like that. It actually is managed as an additional plugin. The next thing that I do is I use the Admin and Site Enhancements plugin that I’ve already told you about, and I use the Admin menu organizer that’s built in. So once And once I turned on that function, I have this screen under settings, and it allows me to organize this side menu the way that I please within reason. There are some things that cannot do because it basically all uses the hook system of WordPress.

And so Sometimes, if I were to try to drag a submenu item from fluent forms up into fluent CRM, it isn’t going to do it. It does have some limitations. But that being said, you can rename some of these things. You can drag and drop some of them. So for For example, concierge clients and the anytime credits are moved up to the top because I use those all the time. Some things that I just don’t use that much, I either drop them down here to the bottom or I will outright hide it. I’ll just hide it, and then I can make it to where it’s hidden all the time, or I can hide until toggled, in which case I have a thing down here to show all, and it will show some of the hidden menus that I just don’t use very often. The other thing that I do is I put in these separators. So basically, as I’m looking at it, it It puts it into groups for me. So this is administrative stuff. These are my fluent products for bookings, for the forms, for the CRM. This is all content stuff for managing content across the site.

This is for the e-commerce stuff, so Carp Flows and Woocommerce. And you can see that I have them with these separators. And these separators are things that I put in here with admin and site enhancements with the menu organizer. Now, when you put in one of these separators, by default, it’s going to have a little space, but you can’t actually see it, which is a little bit on the annoying side. So what I actually do is go down here to Fluent Snippets. And I’ve got a little plop code here, Admin Menus Separator. Just a little bit of CSS on here. I have it run on the back-end because it’s not relevant for the front-end, and it will modify those separators, give it a nice color, give it a margin, makes it two pixels in height, stuff like that. And I customize the menu. Another One cool thing, by the way, a little side thing that Admin Site Enhancements can do is that you can make this side menu wider. I think I’ve made mine to 180 pixels, but you can make it wider so that you just have more breathing room over there. So there’s definitely things that you could do to customize the Admin Panel.

I’m doing the easy stuff with Admin and Site Enhancements, but when you get down into the nerdy stuff with Custom CSS and things like that, you can really make it your own. Another Another thing you definitely want to do if you’re going to turn this Admin Panel into your zone and not other people’s zones, is you need to be able to hide those stupid notifications. I do that with the Admin and Site Enhancements plugin yet again, and I hide admin notices. What this thing will do is instead of allowing plugins to insert all these notifications about all kinds of dumb stuff all over your admin panel whenever they feel like it, this thing will intercept them, hide it, and drop it up here under a notices drop-down. So I only see the notices when I want to see the notices in a drop-down. As you can see right now on my site, I don’t have any notices, so there’s nothing showing up. But if they were there, that’s where they would show up. They would not clutter up the interface, and that’s a super big deal because with all the stuff that we do, what’s the point of it if these plugins are inserting ads and crap into the system?

I mean, it’s just not the right thing to do. Shame on them for doing it, frankly. But if they’re going to do it, let’s put it in a drop-down and don’t clutter up my interface with it. Another thing that you can do is to modify the editing experience so that when you’re actually writing content, it’s just easier to do. To show you that, let’s act as if I’m going to do a new post. Let’s open up the editor. You’ve got all this stuff. You’ve got this stuff showing up here at the bottom for the SEO. I could turn all this off. This is from SEO press, and I could disable all that stuff. And then you got stuff over here, all these little slide panels. And then you got the block editor itself with all the available blocks that you could throw in here, most of which we just never use, right? So here’s what you can do. Other than going into plugin settings themselves, for example, again, SEO press, I could turn all this off if I just didn’t want to see it. But if you go over those three little dots in the corner, go down to preferences.

Here, you could take a lot control. You could start hitting these toggles and start turning off the sidebar meta boxes and all kinds of stuff, turning off anything that you just never touch. Then another thing is go over here to blocks, and now you’re going to have a list of all the different blocks that plugins and stuff are inserting in, and you can uncheck the ones you just never, ever touched. These ones at the top are for cadence. I use those most often. But when you pop down here, you can see that I’ve unchecked some stuff that I just don’t ever use. And so why do I need it to show up there? In fact, there’s some in here right now I’d never even use. I could probably get rid of. I don’t use the columns one. I use the cadence rows instead. So there’s a lot here I could probably still get rid of. But the point is, it’s a pretty customizable interface, and it’s worth your time to do it because when you’re editing content, you just want to be able to do the content. You don’t need to have all this other stuff unless you’re actually using it.

And you don’t have to just accept what plugins insert and act like, Oh, I guess that’s it. That’s it now. You can actually turn these things off and still have the capabilities of those plugins. Lastly, I wanted to show you this plugin called Admin Columns. It’s a really, really handy plugin. It does have a free version But the pro version will do more stuff. All right. And basically what this allows you to do is take any of your list screens throughout the WordPress Admin Panel, like posts and pages, other custom post types, the user list, any of those things, the product list in Woocommerce. And you can completely and totally customize those listing screens to your liking by removing columns you never want to look at, adding new columns that you do want to see. It’ll, of course, bring in stuff from advanced custom fields and your SEO plugins and all that type of stuff. It gives you sorting capability. You can even create different screens. So you can have different ways of looking at the same data. And you can set all this up with admin columns without having to know any code whatsoever.

And it is very, very handy. I don’t think I’ve got it in place anymore, but I used to have a thing where I had a different view of my blog post. Yeah, I don’t have it in there anymore, but I had definitely removed columns. I put the feature image column in there so I can see it. But I used to have a whole different view of the screen that just showed columns that were related to doing a content audit. So it would show things like my admin notes on post. It would show the date that I last went in there and revisited post, which was a custom date field from advanced custom field, not the last modified one that comes built into WordPress. So you can really using this information, using admin columns and using advanced custom fields and things like that, You can customize the heck out of this stuff and really, really do a lot with it. To wrap this up, the main thing to remember here is that you’re not stuck with what WordPress presents to you right off the bat. And in most cases, it’s It’s not even WordPress doing it.

It’s actually the plugins that you’re installing. And they have their own purposes because they want to promote stuff to you. They want you to see and use their plugin. But sometimes they make decisions that you don’t like because They’re putting things in places you don’t want to see them, and you’ve got a business to run. We said at the beginning, you need to remove the constraints from your day-to-day operations within your site. You need to be able to manage and access the data that you need to make to make business decisions, to be able to quickly perform actions inside your site, and you need to basically customize the entire WordPress admin experience to your day-to-day operations, and turn it into a real business command center. And there’s two sides to that. One is to customize and remove pieces that other plugins have put in. So you could do things like modify the columns, remove dashboard widgets, hide stuff, blah, blah, blah. And then the other side of that is to put back in the stuff that suits your purposes through custom dashboard widgets, through perhaps even going as far as creating custom plugins. Now, those types of things, again, are definitely outside the scope of this video.

I can’t teach you how to make a plugin, but I can say that if you want any help with any of this on your website, feel free to get in touch with me at blogmarketingacademy. Com. If you’re a concierge client, the credits are a little bit cheaper for you, but otherwise, just drop some credits on your account. You could book a road map call with me first if you’d like, and we could talk out what the options are. Some things are pretty low-hanging fruit and are not that hard to do. A lot of times, dashboard widgets and stuff like that are not that hard to do. In fact, some of the stuff that I’ve already built, like the upcoming appointment list from Fluent Booking or the Revenue Widget from Woocommerce, I’ve already got the code. I’ve already made it. If you need things to be presented in different ways, we could probably get it done because I’m getting a lot better using AI to make stuff. When it comes to custom plugins, I will say we can talk about it if you want, but generally speaking, I stay outside of the custom plugin business for clients.

But if you run by me what you’re looking to do, maybe it won’t take me so long, and maybe I help you out anyway. But generally speaking, I don’t want to be the only guy on the planet who knows how your site works, so I typically stay out of that business. But Hit me up, maybe we’ll help you out. Okay? So anyway, that’s basically that. I want you to take the time right now, go into your WordPress admin panel, look for stuff that’s in your way, look for the stuff you never use, look for things that you could make different about your WordPress admin panel that will speed up your own ability to manage your own website. And then maybe do a little bit of Christmas wishlisting on things that would be really cool if I had a plugin that did precisely that thing. Sometimes we can find out-of-the-box solutions that can do it. Other times, we have to build something for ourselves. All right? And once again, if you’d like to talk about that, just book a road map call over at blogmarketingacademy. Com. And with that, I’ll see you on the next video.