In this tutorial, I will show you how to login to your WordPress administration area on Bluehost and introduce you to the most important tools there.
The admin area is where you control everything about your website. if you’ve ever heard the term backend this is what it means where the frontend of your website is what the world sees when they visit your domain name or the live published website. Now let’s take a quick tour of the key parts of the website we’re going to create.
First, there’s the overall design or look which we call a theme. Most themes have a header, a sidebar, the main page or post area and a footer. You may have two types of content,
1. Some permanent static content like these top links made of pages.
2. Dynamic content like a blog where you periodically publish new posts to keep visitors coming back to find out what’s new.
Your pages and posts may contain media like images, videos, and other documents.
And that covers your basic website design.
You also have few behind the scenes decisions to make like whether you need more than one user to manage your site and whether you’d like to install any plugin to automatically add exciting functionality like contact forms or image galleries. All of these things are managed on the backend administration page. Let’s take a look at that right now.
To get to the admin area you must first login. Type your website name in your browser’s address bar and then add “/wp-admin”.
Now enter your username and password and press login.
As soon as you login you have access to all tools to control your entire website. Don’t worry if this looks like a lot of buttons because it’s really quite intuitive and you’ll get comfortable with it in no time. After I show you around feel free to check out all the links and explore the site area. Remember, the best way to learn WordPress is to play around and see what things do.
The top row of the admin screen provides a few shortcuts to common tasks like visiting your site:
or clicking on “Howdy…” followed by your username, Edit My Profile and Log Out.
You can edit contact info and password by clicking on “Edit My Profile”.
What makes this content creation process really efficient is to open my site in a new browser tab so I can toggle back and forth between the WordPress dashboard and my website.
As I add content and saved into my site I can switch tabs quickly, refresh my website and see updates immediately. Most website creation and design work is a lot of trial and error to make things look exactly as you would like.
The dashboard page shows a few statistics and things for quick reference in case you’re interested. Now notice that Bluehost created a coming soon page for you that you can dismiss as soon as you are ready for your site to go live.
It’s pretty cool because as long as you are logged into WordPress you will be able to see your site but no one else will unless you click the “click here” button.
The left side toolbar contains links to everything you need to manage your site. Marketplace is a special addon supplied by bluehost in MOJO that delivers some premium WordPress themes and plugins.
Posts
Posts shows all the blog posts you published and let you create new ones. Upon installing WordPress a post entitled “Hello World” is created by default (we will change that later). So don’t worry if you see a post the first time you visit this area, you haven’t been hacked.
Media
Media shows all the pictures, videos, sound recordings and other media you have uploaded to use in posts or pages.
Pages
Pages shows all the permanent or static content pages you have written. Comments let you moderate or screen any comments that visitors have made on your site. Appearance let you change the design of your site by activating different themes along with some other controls that change the look and feel of your website. Plugins let you add or manage prebuilt software addons like photo galleries or spam blockers to add extra functionality to your site. Users let you manage, add or remove a user account. Tools let you export your WordPress website to back up your data and a few other things. Settings let you change the site name, tagline and adjust other details.
And that’s all there is to designing and managing your website. Pretty straightforward right? I hope this tutorial helped you get acquainted with the WordPress login and admin area on Bluehost. If you have any questions feel free to share it in the comments.
Previous (Part 1): How to Install WordPress on Bluehost
can I hide the log in page?
@ash, You mean you want to hide the wp-admin/wp-login.php page?
very useful article.
Cool! What’s Bluehost means?
I have installed wordpress via bluehost and everything is good to go , but when I try to log into wordpress directly (not via bluehost) , it says..invalid username…! How can I solve this frustrating issue?
@Kishan, Do you mean you can’t log in to your site from the wp-admin/wp-login.php page? When WordPress is installed you should also receive an email with your username and password. So if the credentials are wrong you should never see this error.
I want to add my son as a 2nd administrator to help me with my website. How do I do that?
@Mary, You can create another admin user account for your son (Users > Add New).
Thank you!