How to login to WordPress and customize your user settings

On your left you’ll see the beautifully styled, easy-to-manage WordPress login page. This is where it all starts for WP users.

You’ll find the page at http://example.com/wp-login.php (obviously your blog’s name goes where the example.com bit is).

The first time you login to WordPress your user name will be admin and your password will be a bunch of letters/numbers you have no chance of remembering. Hopefully whoever installed WP for you sent you the password.

Enter your username and password, (don’t check the ‘Remember me’ box just yet, we’ll get to that) then click Log in. This will magically transport you to the shiny new WordPress 2.7 Dashboard, pictured below.

How to change your WordPress username and password

The first thing I suggest any new WordPress user does is make their username and password  secure yet memorable. There’s nothing messier than forgetting your password.

In WordPress 2.7 you can do this by clicking on the “Users” tab from your WordPress Backend sidebar. As with most WordPress options, the User panel allows you a number of options. For instance, you can change:

• Your user name
• Your real first and last name
• Your nickname
• Your contact information
• Your login password

Remember that anyone who gets hold of your login information can wreak havoc with your WordPress site, so what we want to do is make it difficult for other people to guess and easy for you to remember.

In the Users pane that should now be displayed on your screen, mouse over the ‘admin’ user and the options ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete’ will display. Click ‘Edit’.

This opens up your Profile page, where you can change things around a bit.

Scroll down the page a bit and you’ll come across the ‘Name’ and ‘Contact Info’ forms.

You can add your first and last name into the relevant boxes (or your nickname) then clicking ‘Update Profile’ at the bottom of the page.

Then go back and change the ‘Display name publicly as’ dropdown box to your name (or nickname). In most WordPress blogs, the Display name is used on the front end of the site to show who wrote the post. Bear this in mind if you want to remain anonymous. Finally, click ‘Update Profile’ again to save the setting.

Next, change your password in the ‘New Password’ form, then hit the ‘Update Profile’ button once more.

You’re done. In the space of 30 seconds you’ve made your WordPress site more difficult for hackers to get into and given your posts & pages a bit more personality by adding your name to them.

Bonus points: Click the ‘Log Out’ button on the top right of the screen, then login again using your new settings, checking the ‘Remember me’ box on the login screen. This allows you to stay logged in and access your Dashboard at http://example.com/wp-admin.

If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments or drop me an email.

Tagged as: Wordpress, WordPress User Guide

Posted in: WordPress Users Guide | 2 comments