As a content management system, WordPress is quite straightforward in use. If you’ve ever used any other website or application in your life, you’ll figure out where’s what on the admin dashboard fast enough.
While all the main features are easy to find, some others remain hidden, in a way. They’re just not designed to draw attention. So, you might spend months working with WordPress without ever bumping into a feature that could save you tons of time and/or manual work.
What are those features, exactly? Let’s break down the top seven not-so-obvious features that will come in handy for any WordPress user.
But be warned: it might take a fair share of your time to master all of them. So, make sure you have it. If you’re a student, you’re probably wondering, “Should I pay someone to write my paper on EssayPro, maybe?” Well, the answer is “yes” if you want to become a WordPress wizard!
Screen Options
Have you ever noticed the Screen Options button in the top right corner, next to Help? Chances are, you haven’t – it’s just not highlighted in any way. But it’s there on most pages of the WordPress dashboard.
So, what makes it special in any way? Well, it’s one major way to see all the features that might’ve been hidden from you this whole time. In a nutshell, if you click the Screen Options button, you’ll see a menu open at the top of the page.
That menu contains all the options and fields for any given page – you can choose to make them visible or hide them. For example, if you press Screen Options on the Edit Post screen, you’ll have an opportunity to hide or show:
- Discussion meta box;
- Custom fields;
- Category selector.
Distraction-Free Writing Mode
Do you sometimes keep staring at your Add New Post screen and then leave it to deal with something else on the admin dashboard? Or maybe, you just don’t find the writing space large enough to help you focus?
Good news! WordPress developers have thought about all of that, and they’ve developed a whole mode for boosting beginning and experienced bloggers’ productivity. This mode is conveniently named Distraction-Free Writing Mode.
Here’s what it does. It hides the left-sidebar menu for the screen, as well as the column with publishing options on the right. You’re left with just the editor taking up all the space on the screen.
How do you activate it? Go to the visual editor. There, on the panel right above the text, click the rightmost button – it’s the Distraction-Free Writing Mode.
WordPress Formatting Shortcuts
You might be one of those people who finish typing the text first and format it later. If that’s your case, it’s probably because formatting takes quite a lot of clicks. But what if it doesn’t have to be this way?
If you want to format your text as you write it, you can use shortcuts to streamline your work. These aren’t your typical shortcuts like the ones in Google Docs – they’re not combinations of keys you have to press. Instead, you have to type a symbol or several before the text to choose the formatting for it.
Here are some of those shortcuts:
- # for H1, ## for H2, ### for H3, and so on;
- * for an unordered list;
- or 1) for an ordered list;
- > for a blockquote;
- — for a horizontal line divider.
Quick-Paste Links & Quick-Embed Media
If you’re still learning your way around WordPress, you probably insert links via the panel above the text. That requires several clicks on your part, which inevitably eats up your time.
You don’t have to go that route, though. Instead, you can just select the text that will be your anchor and press Ctrl+V or Command+V to insert the link. The selected text will automatically turn into a hyperlink!
Now, let’s say you want to add a YouTube video to your article. You don’t need plugins for that, nor do you have to go through the visual editor’s panel. Just paste the link where you want the video to be – and WordPress will automatically embed it. The same goes for images, documents, audio files, etc.
But that’s not all! You can also copy a link to a social media post and paste it into your visual editor. That’ll automatically embed it right on the page.
Sticky Posts
Your posts are likely to be presented in chronological order. But what if you wanted to pin an article for your new readers at the top of the front page, for example?
Don’t worry: you don’t have to manually customize the post order. WordPress has what’s called Sticky Posts – it’s a category of posts that get ‘stuck’ on the front page. You can choose to pin your most popular or highest-earning posts, too, for example.
When you want to make a post sticky, go to its Edit Post page (if it’s already published) or stay on the Add New Post screen. Here’s your step-by-step instruction on what to do next:
- In the Publish menu on the right, click on the Edit link next to Visibility: Public;
- You’ll see visibility options appear under Visibility;
- Under the Public option, you’ll have a checkbox saying Stick this post to the front page;
- Tick it!
WordPress Automatically Closed Comments
If your WordPress project is there to just help you with your studies, you probably don’t plan to maintain it for years. But if you’re lucky enough to make a post that draws people in and engages them in a conversation, you might get notifications about new comments for months or years.
That might be distracting, at best. At worst, you’ll be stuck spending hours replying in the comments to your two-year-old posts.
Of course, you can close comments. But you don’t have to wait until you’re overwhelmed with notifications about your old posts to do it! Instead, you can schedule closing comments after a certain period:
- Go to Settings;
- Choose the Discussion submenu;
- Tick the Automatically close comments on articles older than and select the duration in days.
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In-Built Image Editor WordPress
Let’s imagine you’ve imported an image to WordPress, but now you realize you need to have it cropped. What do you do? Do you open an external app on your desktop, crop it there, delete the old image from the media library, and upload the cropped one?
That’s way too cumbersome – you don’t have to do any of that! Why not use the in-built WordPress image editor instead? It’s no Photoshop, of course, but it’ll get the basic tasks done, such as:
- Cropping the image;
- Resizing it;
- Rotating it;
- Flipping it.
To use it, head to your Media Library. There, select the image you want to work on and click on Edit Image.
In Conclusion
These seven features above might not be obvious for beginning WordPress users, but they can save you lots of time once you know about them. So, go ahead and tinker with them in your admin dashboard!
But, of course, the list above isn’t an exhaustive one. These are just the most helpful ‘hidden’ WordPress features out there. So, if you want to level up your game even further, make sure to look into:
- How to separate a post into multiple pages;
- A secret Options page accessible via example.com/wp-admin/options.php;
- Dashboard widgets and their accessibility mode.