Admin Panel Customization WordPress Plugin

Learn how to customize your WordPress admin panel or dashboard customization for free in the way that you want so you can give it your look

By Claudio Pires
Updated on February 17, 2024
Admin Panel Customization WordPress Plugin

Using some WordPress plugin, you’ll be able to customize your WordPress admin panel in the way you want so you can give it the look that your business needs. Learn how to customize your WordPress admin panel or dashboard customization for free.

Free Plugins Options: Admin Panel Customization WordPress

WP Adminify - WordPress Dashboard Customizer Plugin

WP Adminify – WordPress Dashboard Customizer Plugin

WP Adminify is the best WordPress dashboard customization plugin that lets you transform your admin panel with ease. Whether you want to white label your Dashboard, change the login page, create media folders, edit admin menus, disable admin notices, or switch to dark mode, WP Adminify has it all. With 20+ powerful modules and 9+ modern UI templates, you can personalize your WordPress backend and optimize your workflow.

With WP Adminify, you can easily create custom dashboard widgets and remove all unwanted widgets to achieve a clean and clutter-free dashboard. You can also customize the look and feel of your dashboard widgets with different colors, icons, and fonts. WP Adminify gives you full control over your WordPress admin dashboard. WP Adminify is lightweight, user-friendly, and compatible with any theme or plugin. Download WP Adminify today and experience the best custom WordPress admin dashboard plugin.

WP Custom Admin Interface

WP Custom Admin Interface allows you to customize the WordPress admin menu and toolbar easily and customize the admin and login interface. But we’re just getting started! WP Custom Admin Interface offers many great admin features that other plugins charge for – this one is entirely free.

WP Custom Admin Interface provides an excellent and simple interface to customize the backend of WordPress to give you and your clients a more personalized experience. WordPress admins who manage multiple sites will appreciate the accessible plugin settings export feature, which allows you to deploy custom settings across numerous sites you contain.

Custom Dashboard & Login Page – AGCA

The plugin allows you to customize your WordPress admin panel, login page, admin menu, and bar easily.

  • Admin Bar: Hide or change Admin Bar items. Removes WordPress traces from the admin bar. Mark it with a custom color.
  • Admin Menu: Modify and delete existing and add custom admin menu items. Mark it with a custom color.
  • Colors: This tool integrates with the Glamorous’ custom admin panel and can change the default WordPress admin panel colors, admin bar, admin menu, login page, background, and text.
  • Branding: Brand your admin panel pages with custom content, colors, images, and text.
  • Admin Panel Options: There are many other options for improving WordPress UX on admin and login page elements, such as dashboard widgets, help and screen options, WordPress logo, links, menus, and more. See the complete list below for WordPress admin dashboard customization.

Premium Option

In today’s article, we will talk about how to customize the WordPress admin panel – also known as the WordPress dashboard. Specifically, we will share the WordPress Admin Theme – WPShapere plugin and explore its range of features that enable us to customize various aspects of our WordPress dashboard.

If you’ve worked at a digital agency or are a self-taught digital marketing professional, you’re probably familiar with the reason behind customizing the WordPress dashboard. If you’re looking to get to the crux – feel free to jump to the plugin review directly.

However, if you are curious about understanding the reason behind customization, the following few paragraphs are for you. The question we’ll try to answer is simple:

Why do digital agencies prefer WordPress? WordPress is a CMS that powers nearly 33% of the Internet. It is the most used CMS on the planet. No wonder most digital agencies choose WordPress as their go-to CMS for their clients. Keep reading to learn how to customize admin dashboard panel.

Midsize Example Using Admin Panel Customization in WordPress

Consider the example of Midsize – a digital agency specializing in e-commerce based out of Bloomington, Illinois. Midsize was tasked to revamp the online store of Clinton Electronics to increase site performance and page load speeds.

In this case study, We used a WordPress with WooCommerce support setup, backed by WordPress and powered by the latest version of PHP 7. Midsize ended up getting blazing-fast load time. Specifically:

60% performance gains realized by moving to a dedicated, modern hosting environment with PHP 7!

So why are we talking about digital agencies using WordPress? Most of us already know that! Well, as a digital agency, various strategic decisions must be considered before landing a client.

Good agencies typically avoid the one-size-fits-all approach. Each client is treated as a particular case – the solution is often tailored to the client’s needs using admin dashboard panel customization WordPress.

One of these strategic decisions includes white labeling their solution. The idea is to offer a simple solution that works. All the complicated internal functions are hidden behind an intuitive, custom dashboard of an agency-branded solution. Thanks to WordPress’ business-friendly, open-source code and its reigning #1 position in the CMS marketplace, most digital agencies choose WordPress.

This is where the white labeling of WordPress comes into the picture. One of the simplest ways to offer an agency-branded solution to clients is to customize the WordPress dashboard (or admin panel) to look like the agency’s software solution. We’re going to discuss a plugin that helps you do just that!

Admin Panel Customization WordPress Plugin

Admin Panel Customization WordPress Plugin
Admin Panel Customization WordPress Plugin

To get started, you must install the latest version of the plugin. Purchase a copy at Codecanyon, then use the Envato Market plugin to ensure you never miss an update. Once installed and activated, all plugin settings are located under WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere.

Now let’s dig into the features WPShapere has to offer! These features help to revamp the entire look and feel of your WordPress admin dashboard.

Custom WordPress Login Theme: Admin Panel Customization

The first thing you want to customize for your clients is the WordPress login theme. Because that’s the first thing your clients will see when they access the WordPress (i.e., your solution’s) admin panel.

Ensure that the favicon is updated and the login theme matches your client’s brand identity.

To get started with the customization, navigate to WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere Settings > Login Options.

The login page settings panel has a ton of customization options. Moreover, the board is built to be intuitive. It took me less than a minute to configure a new background to the login page, change the logo, add some footer text, etc.

You can turn on/off individual options such as Back to Blog or the Remember Me link. Using WordPress dashboard customization, you can also disable the custom login page and revert to the basic WordPress theme.

Menu Admin Panel Customization WordPress

WPShapere enables you to customize the admin menu’s name, icon, and visibility to the left of your dashboard. To access these settings, head to WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere > Customize Admin Menus.

In this example, I am renaming the Dashboard menu entry to Control Panel and assigning a globe icon.

The icons can be chosen from either Dashicons or Font Awesome, coupled with search capabilities.

In terms of visibility, you can rearrange the order of the admin menu options. You can also hide certain menu items from different user groups. By default, all admin users can see all menu items without using the WordPress dashboard admin customization.

Dashboard Widgets

Another cool thing to customize in the WordPress admin panel is the default dashboard widgets that appear every time you log in. Only this time with WPShapere, can you customize the content of these widgets. You get four devices to customize, and you can also hide unwanted devices. The options are available under WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere > Dashboard Options.

For example, if you’re a freelance web developer or agency, you might want to put up your company info or support details in these widgets.

If you have a blog, you could put your blog’s content on your client’s website using an RSS Feed Widget.

Admin Bar Customization: WordPress Panel

You can include custom menu items on the admin menu bar at the top of the WordPress dashboard. Create a menu from WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Menus to set up this option.

Once you’ve built the menu, select Adminbar Menu under the Display location in Menu Settings. This will place the menu on the top of the WordPress admin bar.

You can also change the logo, and remove pre-existing elements from the menu, such as WordPress.com, Site Name, etc., from the WPShapere options panel located at WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere >  Adminbar Options.

Custom WordPress Admin Dashboard Themes

WPShapere has 16 built-in color schemes for the WordPress Admin dashboard. To configure this option go to WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere > Import Themes

Select any of the sixteen themes, click Import Theme, and you’re done!

The footer customization option is pretty straightforward. To replace the default “Thank you for creating with WordPress.” at the bottom of your admin panel, navigate to WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere > Footer Options.

Then add your desired text and click to Save Changes.

  • Pro Tip: Include links in the text for extra visibility!

Outgoing Email Customization

WPShapere also lets you customize the name and email address of all emails sent by WordPress. For example, if a new user registers on your site, a customized “from the name” and email address would work wonders for a first impression! The settings are located under: WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere > Email Options.

General Customization

WPShapere’s General Options tab gives you a handful of pretty unique options, which include:

  • Disabling automatic updates of WordPress, including email reminders about automatic updates and WordPress update notifications.
  • Completely hiding particular elements such as the admin bar from the front, screen options button, etc.

You can access these settings from WordPress Dashboard > WPShapere > General Options

However, I would not recommend disabling the WordPress update notification. It is a strict security requirement to update to the latest WordPress version. If you have difficulty managing multiple WordPress sites, you could always use a solution like ManageWP!

Users Privileges

The last powerful option we want to cover that WPShapere has to offer is the selective view based on user permissions. This is particularly helpful if you don’t want your non-tech-savvy users poking and prodding around a live WordPress deployment.

You can always create new users with lesser privileges, or you can allocate view rights to particular users with the same access privilege (i.e., Administrators).

In this example, only Sourav could access all the admin menu links. The greensick user would not have access even though he (or she) is an Administrator. Before I forget, the Menu Customization options are available under General Options (the exact location as the last one).

More to Admin Panel

WPShapere works great on multisite installs and is compatible with popular plugins, including Contact form 7, Visual Composer, WP Super Cache, WP Total Cache, and WooCommerce. Which is excellent for the front end of your WordPress website.

But perhaps you want to make your admin panel even more functional? Give Admin Columns Pro a try! We recently covered all of the excellent features in our guide to managing content with Admin Columns Pro, which makes it easier for you (and your blog authors) to create, edit and organize content.

Specifically, you can create custom column sets to display for specific user roles – perhaps a good combo with your custom dashboard design? Admin Columns Pro also works with multisite, making it an excellent tool for your client work or more extensive WordPress site networks. (Note: we have not personally tested the compatibility of these two plugins, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t play nice).

Last Words

So there you have it, folks – a complete walkthrough of the WPShapere plugin (plus some extra tips) to customize your WordPress admin panel any way you see fit! Have we missed any features? Let us know!

As always, we’d love to hear from you. Do you use a while-label branding solution for WordPress? If yes, is it WPShapere? If not, are you considering switching?

Claudio Pires

Claudio Pires is the co-founder of Visualmodo, a renowned company in web development and design. With over 15 years of experience, Claudio has honed his skills in content creation, web development support, and senior web designer. A trilingual expert fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, he brings a global perspective to his work. Beyond his professional endeavors, Claudio is an active YouTuber, sharing his insights and expertise with a broader audience. Based in Brazil, Claudio continues to push the boundaries of web design and digital content, making him a pivotal figure in the industry.