How to Customize WordPress Back End (And Why You'd Want to)

As most of you may know, themes are an inherent part of WordPress. They enable you to customize your website’s front end easily, and there’s a theme for almost every style of design. However, what if you want to customize WordPress back end?

As it happens, there are themes for the WordPress back end as well, albeit not as well known as their front end siblings. Also (and somewhat confusingly), they come in the form of plugins – we’ll explain how this works later.

In this article, we’ll discuss why you’d want to customize WordPress back end, present several plugins you can use to do so, then finally how to go about it. Let’s get started!

Why you would want to customize WordPress back end

The benefits of customizing the front end of your website are self-evident, but not so much when it comes to your back end. Because it’s not a front and center element of your site, it’s often neglected. However, customizing your back end brings a whole host of benefits, including:

Increased usability by re-arranging sections, adding or disabling them as necessary.
Reinforcement of your brand’s image among your team.

Also, it arguably feels better to use an attractive back end – WordPress’ default dashboard can be a bit drab, and simple makeover can help enhance the user’s experience.

All things considered, overhauling the style of your WordPress back end isn’t strictly necessary – but considering how easy it is to do and the benefits you stand to gain, it’s worth the effort.

Three plugins to customize WordPress back end

WordPress doesn’t include back end theme functionality by default, so we need to rely on plugins to achieve our end goal. We’ve selected three of the most high-quality back end theme plugins available, and later on we’ll take one of them and show you how to use it.

1. Blue Admin

The Blue Admin plugin enables you to implement a clean and clear style overhaul to your WordPress dashboard. It’s an excellent pick for those of you that favor minimalism.

2. Flatty

If you happen to like the default style of WordPress’ dashboard, consider using Flatty. This plugin doesn’t introduce any major style overhauls – instead, it enables you to tweak it with a handful of branding features.

3. WPShapere (premium)

Out of all the plugins in this list, WPShapere provides you with the most advanced customization options. This is definitely the tool to pick if you’re looking for a total dashboard overhaul.

How to customize WordPress back end using Blue Admin (in 2 Steps)

Although we’ve discussed three excellent tools to customize WordPress back end, the Blue Admin plugin is our focus for this section. This particular solution goes into effect right after activation, which makes it ideal to showcase what these types of tools can accomplish:

Once you install the plugin, you’ll notice your dashboard change immediately. The plugin will re-style your entire back end to a blue and white color scheme – which is kind of Facebook-like. Aside from the steps we’ll cover below, the only other option available is to change the default color settings – which you can do from the Blue Admin > Color Scheme screen in your dashboard.

Step #1: Modify your dashboard toolbar

(By the way, it’s a good idea to back up your website before doing any serious experiments with this plugin. You know, just in case…)

Also, for those of you who wish to look at other options for customizing your back end, we’ve already covered this in the past:

Aside from overhauling the style of your back end, Blue Admin also enables you to customize your dashboard’s toolbar (i.e. the the navigation bar located at the top of the screen):

To get started, click on the Blue Admin tab on your dashboard, then hit the Enable button under Custom Adminbar Menus:

From here, go to Appearance > Menus and create a new menu using a name you’ll recognize. In this case, we went with Dashboard Toolbar and set its display location as Blue Admin: Adminbar Menu:

With your new menu ready, it’s time to test it out. You can add pages, posts, custom post types, and even links to it similar to any other menu. Simply select the items you want on the widget at the left of Menu Structure, and click on Add to Menu. Once you save your changes, the new items will appear at the top of your dashboard:

In our example, we’ve added a link to our home page and another to a sample page. We recommend you populate yours with any sections of your site that deserves special attention. That way, they’ll only be a click away.

Step #2: Customize your login page

On top of customizing our back end, the Blue Admin plugin also enables us to tweak our login pages. To do so, you need to enable the corresponding feature within the Blue Admin tab:

Once enabled, a Settings button will appear within the same widget. Clicking this redirects you to a page with two sections – one to customize your login form, and another to tweak your background:

Changing these settings is fairly straightforward – in most cases, you’ll simply need to enter new hex color codes for each respective section. You can use this tool to identify the colors you want to use, along with their respective hex codes. Once you have them, simply paste them on the corresponding fields, hit the Save Changes button, and you’re done!

(For a more in-depth take on customizing your login page, see our other guide.)

Conclusion

There are several ways to customize WordPress back end, but using plugins is the simplest of them all. They enable you to extend your branding to your back end, and make customizations to make things more usable for those accessing it.

In this piece, we’ve shown you how to customize your back end using the Blue Admin plugin – although the steps can be adapted to any solution.

What benefits will you hope to get from changing the look of WordPress’ back end? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!

How to Customize WordPress Back End (And Why You’d Want to)

Why you would want to customize WordPress back end