Screen Options: Unclutter Your Workspace

The standard WordPress Dashboard can seem a little overwhelming, with many menu items and choices on every screen. You can streamline each screen to hide options if they aren't needed.

For example, here's the default Largo Dashboard Home screen:

Streamline Your Screen

This screen has lots of options that might be helpful the first time you see it, but become clutter as you before familiar with WordPress. We probably don't need the Welcome to WordPress! area and most people don't use the Quick Draft box. We can remove these from the Dashboard Home screen by clicking on the Screen Options tab:

Click the Screen Options tab and it reveals a set of checkboxes:

You can deselect any of the options to hide them from the screen. You can then drag and drop remaining options to reorder them to suit your preference. As a user this will only affect your own Dashboard, so you're not changing the screen options for anyone else.

In this case, we've decided to show only the At a Glance box which has links to our Posts and Pages screens and also displays which version of WordPress and Largo we're running, and the Project Largo Help links which can come in handy:

Screen Options Vary Depending on the Screen You're On

The Screen Options button exists on many screens in the WordPress Dashboard. The options in Screen Options will vary depending on which page you're on.

For example, here are the screen options for the Media Library:

Here are the screen options for the Posts > All Posts screen:

And for an individual post, here are the screen options on the Post Edit screen:

screen options for a post screen in wordpress

The Post Edit screen has the most complex set of fields. Some of these fields will almost never be used:

Custom Fields - rarely, if ever, need to be touched by post authors
Slug - the part of the post URL containing the title (lower-case and hyphenated)

To streamline your screen, just hide them in Screen Options.

If you ever find something missing that you expected to see on any particular screen in the Dashboard, check Screen Options to see if it's been deselected.