Accessing your WordPress site

- Your WordPress site has two sides, the forward-facing side your visitors see when they go to your site, commonly referred to as the front end, and the password protected backwards-facing side you access any time you want to create new content or otherwise manage your site, commonly referred to as the back end, or admin panel. Accessing the front end of your site is as simple as entering the site URL in the address bar of your browser. Here you can see the demo site I'll be working with throughout this course, found at wp.hplussport.com, and it currently only has the default demo content that ships with WordPress, this "Hello world!" post and its one comment down here, but you can see that the site already works the way it's supposed to with the current default theme, which is 2015.

What we're going to focus on is the back end. This is where you'll do the majority of your work with WordPress, and where we'll spend the majority of our time in this course. Accessing the back end of your WordPress site requires going to the login page and entering your username and password. To get to the login page on any WordPress site, simply enter the main URL for the site, so in my case wp.hplussport.com, and type in /wp-admin. Now, technically, wp-admin is the URL to the admin panel, so the back end of WordPress, but if you're not logged in, it automatically redirects to the login panel, so it's easy to remember.

Just use wp-admin, and you'll always get either to login or directly to the admin panel. From this login page, you can do a couple of things. You can either enter your username and password, and then get the browser to remember your username and password so you don't have to keep reentering it. You can also retrieve your password if you forgot it. So you can click "Lost your password?" here, and enter either your username or your e-mail address, and a new password will be generated. And finally you can click this back button that will take you back to the front end of your site.

Before we continue, I just want to bring up one small point. If you go online, you'll find people saying that leaving the login page open like this under yoursite.com/wp-admin is a security risk, and that you should use a plugin to hide it. This is not good advice. While it may seem like having a simple link to the login page might be an issue, the reality is this is no different from your bank having a login form on their front page. The login page is as secure as your password, and as long as you have a strong password, you should be fine.

That said, let's log in to WordPress, and see that we can get into the back end. I've filled in my username and my password. I'm going to get my browser to remember my username and password, because this is my computer. This should only be done on your own computer. And then click Log in. If everything goes correctly, you should now be on the WordPress back end and see the Dashboard.