11 hidden WordPress features

If you’ve been working with WordPress for a long time, you probably know your way around – you can create posts and pages, edit your menu and make the most important settings. But there are a few less obvious features in the WordPress admin that can save you a lot of time. I bet you don’t know all of them yet (leave me a comment if you do).

1. Customize the view for more options in the backend

At the very top right you will find a button with which you can set additional view options. For example, you can have additional information displayed in the post overview or when editing.

2. Page templates

Did you know that your theme (probably) comes with different page templates? With the page templates you can control whether a certain page is displayed with a sidebar or in full width, for example.

3. Post formats

The situation is similar with the contribution formats. Depending on which formats your theme offers, you can select these for each post. In addition to the standard format, you will often find variants for videos, links, picture galleries or quotes there. Just try it out with your theme.

4. Organize your dashboard

On the start page of the WordPress backend (at deinedomain.de/wp-admin/) there are a handful of widgets by default. Some plugins are visible here as a separate widget, e.g. Google Analytics, Yoast SEO and Statify.
Did you know that you can rearrange, remove, and show more of these widgets?

5. Insert links directly into the text

Since WordPress 4.5, the link editor looks a little different in the text editor. Conveniently, you can now simply mark the desired text and paste the URL – with Ctrl + V (Windows) or Cmd + V (Mac):

6. Edit images in WordPress

In principle, you should edit pictures according to your wishes before uploading them, cut them to size and, above all, reduce them to a reasonable size .

But even after the upload you can still edit images in WordPress – you can, for example, scale, crop or mirror them.

7. Split blog posts across multiple pages

With very long articles it can be inconvenient to scroll a lot and lose sight of the rest of the page structure. The next-page tag can help, with which you can divide each blog post into several pages. Simply add “<! – nextpage–>” (two hyphens each) to the text as a page break (only works in text mode, not under “Visual”) and you will receive a multi-page article including page navigation.

Unfortunately, the page navigation is not necessarily displayed in the desired location and is simply forgotten in the design by many theme developers. You can help with CSS or change the position by adjusting the theme templates if you are familiar with it.

8. Embed social media links and videos directly

Paste a URL from YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Medium or some other popular service directly into the WordPress editor – WordPress will automatically convert the link and display the video or the linked content directly. Practical, isn’t it?

 

9. Database options

Go to deinedomain.de/wp-admin/options.php. Here you can find all options from the WordPress database table wp_options. In this way you can check settings during troubleshooting and change them if necessary. But be careful if you change something here!

10. Abbreviations in text formatting

Formatting an article well and clearly can be a lot of work. WordPress provides you with a few shortcuts that make this much faster while you are writing. Here is a selection (the double quotation marks are not part of the abbreviations, but are used for identification):

• Start a new list with “*” or “-” on a new line
• Start a new list with “1.” or “1)” in a new line
• Use the tab key to move bullet points one level further to the right (opposite Shift + Tab to move further to the left)
• Start a new line with “#” to convert it to an h1 (heading 1), or “##” for h2, “###” for h3 etc.
• Start a new line with “>” to create a quote.
• Undo in WordPress Editor: Ctrl + Z (Windows) or Cmd + Z (Mac)

11. Super fast comment moderation

If you get a lot of comments and / or pingbacks, managing them can be time consuming. It’s much faster with these shortcuts.

First activate this in your user profile:

 

The keyboard shortcuts:

• J = to the next comment (down)
• K = to the previous comment (high)
• A = approve comment (“approve”)
• U = withdraw comment approval (“unapprove”)
• D = delete comment (“delete”)
• R = reply to a comment (“reply”)
• Q = quick edit mode (“quick edit”)
• Z = restore comment from trash