Plugins and Workflows for Getting the Most Out of the WordPress Dashboard

How many clicks of the mouse would you say you make in the WordPress dashboard everyday?

Hundreds? Thousands?

For most of you, the WordPress dashboard is where you spend most of your time, modifying posts, inserting custom code, testing themes, uploading images, and trying to write out a blog post that makes your followers share it all over the internet.

The dashboard is your friend, but let’s be honest, sometimes you want to punch that friend in the face.

That’s why it’s time to start optimizing the WordPress dashboard with some of the most incredible plugins and workflows to ensure increased productivity and happy working. Keep reading to learn about optimizing the WordPress dashboard to its fullest.

Tips for Optimizing the WordPress Dashboard

A neat list of plugins is coming below, but I want to start with some essential tips for cleaning up and organizing the way your dashboard functions and looks.

• Customize your WordPress dashboard with items like screen options, collapsible menus, organization plugins, and admin themes.
• Specify your WordPress user roles to ensure that your site is safe and that people like writers, workers and contract designers don’t mess anything important up.
• Consider tools that help you track your social media accounts from your WordPress dashboard, since it’s usually a pain to keep jumping back and forth between these various accounts.
• Try out options that help you manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard if you run a website design business or a collection of your own websites.
• Look into a few of the best WordPress books to reference tips and tricks for working in the WordPress dashboard.
• Create custom login pages for branding or client purposes.
• Check out our guided tour of the WordPress admin if you’re new to the whole system.

Simple Tasks and Todo’s

The Simple Tasks and Todo’s plugin has a unique advantage in assisting with optimizing the WordPress dashboard. It’s basically a checklist or task manager, which we have seen in various other plugins; however this option gives you access to the task list from every page on your website.

The plugin provides an overlay view so it’s not too distracting, and it allows pending, completed, and cancelled tasks. The plugin is given out for free, but a pro version is available, which includes features to assign tasks to users, create urgent tasks, comment on those tasks and more.

Admin Menu Editor

The WordPress admin menu is generally a mess once you start adding plugins, and it doesn’t cater towards personalization. After all, you may rather have the Posts tab at the top of the menu, or all the way at the bottom. The Admin Menu Editor plugin lets you change menu tab titles, organize the menu with a drag and drop interface, and even hide or show certain items.

The pro version starts at $19, and it allows per-role menu permissions, the ability to hide menu items from certain users, and a menu export option.

Expert Tip: The Admin Menu Editor works nicely with the Simple Tasks and Todo’s plugin, since they both allow for user-permissions, setting the stage for a clean menu, along with clear tasks for your workers and writers.

WP-Optimize

Manual queries use to serve as the best way to clean up your WordPress database, but WP-Optimize changed all of that.

The feature list is huge, but just to give you an idea, here is a short version:

• Remove your trashed comments
• Enable or disable comments and trackbacks
• Get rid of stale post revisions
• Remove all spam comments
• Clean out the post trash
• Get email notifications for the automatic cleanups

Search Regex

The Search Regex plugin is all about the search and replace plugin, increasing your productivity in the dashboard by allowing you to search and replace just about any data found on your site.

The main goal with the plugin is to assist with website migration and upgrading. For example, it’s a pain to search for image directory names and change them to something new. This automates the entire search process.

Broken Link Checker

Broken links are not only a nuisance to your visitors, but they discount your standing with search engines. It’s always wise to regularly search your website for broken links, but the manual process is quite awful.

The Broken Link Checker plugin uses the dashboard to notify you when you have a broken link. It focuses on broken links, along with redirects and missing images that make your site a little less friendly.

Pretty Link Lite

Making outbound links is more successful when the links don’t look ugly and long. Not to mention, affiliate links are more effective when branded for your own website.

Pretty Link Lite cleans up those ugly links, shrinks them, lets you manage and create them from the dashboard, and even share those URLs on any website.

Expert Tip: The Pretty Link Lite plugin works well with the Broken Link Checker, since once you find the broken links, you can clean them up and insert something more beautiful.

Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar WordPress plugin helps you plan and manage your blog post schedule in a clean and visual format. It’s essentially a big calendar that sits on your dashboard, using a drag and drop editor to move, edit, add and delete blog posts for certain dates.

The best part is that you can manage posts from multiples authors, instead of running a completely different software for your editorial team.

Expert Tip: The Editorial Calendar works nicely with the Simple Tasks and Todo’s plugin, since you can run through your task list and then schedule the posts right after those tasks are done.

Admin Quick Jump

Think about how often you navigate back to your Posts list to look at another article in the WordPress dashboard. It’s a little tedious, and for some reason you always have to jump back to that long list after modifying a post.

The Admin Quick Jump plugin adds a rather simple dropdown list to the Edit-Post area, which brings up other draft and published pages and posts. Basically, you never have to see that Post list again.

Imsanity

Imsanity has an insane amount of good reviews, and it’s because the plugin makes your dashboard so much easier to work with.

The idea behind it is quite simple, in that it automatically scales down huge image uploads. The bulk resize feature is there to help with previously uploaded images, and you rarely have to worry about cropping, resizing or even thinking about your images after installing the plugin.

Expert Tip: Imsanity works well with the Editorial Calendar plugin, since multi-author blogs often have problems with authors uploading huge photos. Plus, the calendar keeps those authors organized.

Over to You

That’s it for learning about optimizing the WordPress dashboard! Drop a line in the comments section if you have any questions about these plugins and tips. Feel free to share any other plugins that help you while working in the WordPress dashboard.