When you develop a website for your client, you might face lots of challenges. When it comes to WordPress, most of the time it is not necessary that your client is WordPress savy. Getting started with WP could be a bit difficult.

So, it’s best to simplify WordPress dashboard/admin interface. Not every option is required for clients, so such links can be eliminated. Some useful features can be added to make tasks easy. Likewise there could be changes to color scheme or anything else. Let’s talk more about it.

How to customize WordPress admin interface?

Here are some simple tips that help you to make your WordPress Admin interface client friendly.

1. Limit Access

Most of the time, your client doesn’t need for all the items in your WordPress Admin area. There are few of them who knows everything about WordPress and take full advantage of it.

Now they will definitely try to get something new on their website and start changing all the settings which sometimes goes wrong. So it’s better to give your client an editor account. With this editor account you can give limited access to your client.

They only access the things that doesn’t go bad with the website. Below is a screenshot of Administrator account:

Here is the screenshot of editor’s account:

2. Add getting Started Guide in your WP Admin Area

Getting Started guide helps your client a lot in customizing their WordPress website. You can use a WordPress plugin to add WP guide.

WP Help is one of the best plugins available in WordPress repository. The plugin enables site operator to create detailed and hierarchical documentation for their clients. Once you’ve created a documentation it will be available in WordPress Admin area like below screenshot:

If your client has any query related to Help topics they can ask through this guide and you can place your answer in this guide only. This is one of the best solution to make WordPress interface client friendly.

3. Add simple icons for fewer clicks

When you hand over the WordPress website to your client, your client always wants some simplification in it. To simplify your WordPress website, you can add Admin Management Xtended plugin. The plugin enables you to add simple icons which allows single click access.

The highlighted icons in above screenshot helps you to easily publish your article, change the publication date of the article and much more in a single click. One of the best features of the plugin is it offers drag and drop feature to change the page order.

The plugin customize WordPress Admin interface to a great extent.

4. Install and Activate WP Admin UI Customize

WP Admin UI Customize is the most popular and feature rich back end customization plugin for WordPress. There is no need to customize your WP Admin area with coding.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can customize anything in your WordPress admin area. You can change the User roles, remove generator meta tags and other meta tags and much more.

To change the User role, click on WP Admin UI Customize in your WP navigation area. You’ll see the result like below screenshot:

Select the user role you want to customize first. You can also set separate UIs for different User Roles.

5. Customize Admin Bar Menu

When you looged in to your WordPress website, you always see the black strip on the top of your website. This is your Admin. You can also cutomize this for your client with the help of WP Admin UI Customize plugin.

Click on WP Admin UI Customize >> Admin Bar Menu. You’ll see different options that are appeared in the left and right of Admin Menu bar. You can drag and drop these options to change or remove them.

You can also change the text of your Admin Bar Menu. For example, in the below screenshot I changed the blog name:

With this you can also add other items to the Admin bar like WordPress.org support or documentation etc.

6. Update Notifications

Update Notifications might irritate your clients when displayed on their WordPress dashboard. Whereas some want to get updated with these notifications. So you can enable/disable update notifications with the help of WP Admin UI Customize plugin.

Click on WP Admin UI Customize >> General Settings. There you’ll see different options like below screenshot:

If your client don’t want notify with any of the above settings then enable these boxes. You can also remove Screen options and Help tab which you can see every time when you logged in to your WordPress website.

7. Customize Login Screen

When you are handling off the site to your client, the first thing user see is login screen. It is good idea to add your own style and change the look of login screen. WordPress offers you best solution for this.

With WP Admin UI Customize plugin, you can change the login screen of the WordPress website. To do this click on WP Admin UI Customize >> Login Screen. You can change the logo on the login screen. It also allows you to change the logo title, link after clicking on logo and much more.

Wrap Up

After following above mentioned tips, your Dashboard is completely customized and turn into client-friendly dashboard. You just need few plugins and your website is ready with more streamlined and user-friendly interface.

Did we miss something? Please share your thoughts in comment section below.