How to Use WordPress – My Home

In this series we’ve been looking at the basics of how to use Ye Olde WordPress before all the newfangled updates were introduced, such as the Block Editor. Now we’ll look at some of the updated pages, starting with the new dashboard: My Home. You can find this page by clicking on My Site in the top left corner. If you have more than one blog, it’ll say My Sites and clicking on it will bring you to the My Home page for your main site.

You can change sites by clicking on the Switch Site link in the top left corner and selecting the blog you want from the list. Or use this url – just change it to include the name of your blog in the appropriate place:

https://wordpress.com/home/YOURBLOG

Here’s My Home page for my main website:

The menu on the left-hand side contains links to all the areas of your site. For example Site takes you to pages for managing your Posts, Pages, Media, Comments, Feedback, and Testimonials. However, the Feedback link will take you back to the Classic dashboard version.

Under Design you have links to the Customizer and Themes; while Tools has links for Importing and Exporting your content, as well as things like Plugins; and Manage includes links for your Domains, Settings, and the People associated with your blog, like authors, admins, and followers.

On the My Home page itself you can see an overview of your stats for the last seven days, including the Most Popular Day and the Most Popular Hour, as well as the Top Post and the Top Page.

On the right-hand side is another menu of Quick Links which allow you to jump to the task you want to complete, including Writing a Post (in the Block Editor), moderating comments, adding pages, editing menus, and customising the theme.

Continuing down the page, there are links to the Help pages and other WordPress stuff like the app and details on the free photo library.

Overall, there’s a lot less information here than on the Classic Dashboard so it really only serves as a jumping off point for doing other things. One of the main things missing is the Links page for adding and editing links to use in widgets, for example. So if you use this feature, you’ll have to manage it from the Classic Dashboard.

Next we’ll look at the updated version of the Stats…