The Complete Guide to WP Admin and How to Optimize Your Site for Maximum Performance

What is WP Admin?

WP Admin, or WordPress Admin Dashboard in the long-written version, controls the content and manages the entire website. You cannot administrate your WordPress site (create posts, change appearance, access analytics, change the design, manage users, themes and plugins) or do anything else without going to the WP admin panel.

Here is my complete guide to WordPress Admin Dashboard: Beginner’s guide to the WordPress dashboard

How to access WordPress Admin?

The WP admin dashboard is accessed by going to yoursite.com/wp-admin/. If you are not logged in, you have first to go to yoursite.com/wp-login.php and type your user credentials (username and password). For security reasons, when accessing the WordPress admin dashboard, it is better to access the dashboard from a low-tier user credential (editor, helper) and not from the main username (the main WordPress administrator).

How to optimize WP Admin?

The WordPress admin dashboard is directly related to the entire website. If you want to speed up your backend dashboard, you have to make sure:

1.  The WordPress CMS is correctly installed.
2. You do not have too many plugins – It is an excellent procedure to get rid of unused plugins.
3. You are using a light theme and not a bloated one.
4. Very important to use quality WordPress hosting.

The four points mentioned above are correlated, so if you miss one of them, your site may become very slow, and the wp-admin will not load properly. 

Here is my complete guide about how to speed up your WordPress site: [Complete Guide] WordPress Speed Optimization

How to secure WP Admin?

Again, WP Admin is directly related to your website, so talking about securing the WordPress admin dashboard has almost the same meaning as securing your entire WordPress site.

Here are a few essential tweaks to do in order to secure your site:

1. User credentials: If your wp-admin user credentials are something like “admin” and “123456”, you are missing the entire point of securing your site. Instead of this, use a strong username (D3lT4BeT4alPh4) and a strong password ($tR0Ng*_p4s$w0Rd(s)~). I recommend this as the first step.
2. Do not ever install nulled plugins or themes – You put your site at risk directly from the inside.
3. Install a security plugin. You can find a list here.
4. Create daily backups (or as often as you can). 
5. Update everything (WordPress CMS, the theme, and the plugins). Before updating anything, create a complete backup of your site.
6. Hosting server – If you run multiple WordPress sites through cPanel, deploy them in separate cPanel accounts. Do not use addon domains. This generally means getting a VPS or Dedicated server. 
7. Use a 2FA auth feature.
8. Cloudflare or any other similar service (free or paid) is very useful. 

Note: If you are making decent money from your sites, there is no excuse to use shared hosting. One compromised WordPress installation generally causes the entire account to get infected due to everything being owned by the cPanel user.

Here is my complete guide about How to secure WordPress site

The best 4 WordPress Security Plugins in 2022

WordFence WordPress Plugin: Wordfence is a free enterprise-class WordPress security plugin that protects your website from hacks and malware. Unlike traditional security solutions, Wordfence proactively defends your site on three fronts: blocking hacking attempts, removing malware infections, and monitoring access to your site.

Sucuri plugin: Sucuri Security is a WordPress plugin that will help protect your site and data from malware, hackers, and other security threats. It offers a variety of features, including real-time file protection, malware scanning, and intrusion detection. Sucuri Security is accessible to all WordPress users.

WP Security Scan: This plugin scans your site for vulnerabilities or malware and provides you with an actionable report on what needs to be fixed. It also has an option to scan your site from the WordPress dashboard.

WP-Hide: WP-Hide is an innovative plugin for WordPress that allows you to hide important files from being shown on the front side. This is a massive improvement over WP-Admin security (and the entire website) since WP-Hide does not need to update or use any external services like Cloudflare.

If you want to learn more about which WordPress plugins are the best, take a look here: 8 Must-Have WordPress Plugins and Features