Website administrators guide

You can add new users by going to the User tab and selecting Add New. In most cases, you will be adding users who don’t already have WordPress Logins, so you’ll need to use the Add New User section of this page.

Remember that you should not be creating accounts for team addresses or shared mailboxes. Each account should only be used by one person.

Enter their username, which should only include letters and numbers (no spaces or special characters) and their email address. Select the type of user permissions you would like for this new user. We’ll go into the differences between these different user types in a bit.

Once you’ve done this, the user will get an email that will have a link which they will need to open to finish setting up their account. They may need to check their Junk mailbox if they don’t immediately receive the email. If they are a new user, they will be brought to a page that has a temporary password. They will need to copy this password and then go to the log in screen (yourdomain.org/wp-admin).

Once they’ve logged in, they’ll probably want to change their password to something they can more easily remember.

They can do this by clicking on their username in the top right-hand side of the CMS (again, left-hand side if you are using RTL settings!) Tell them to scroll down to the Account Management where they can enter a new secure password.

To finish setting up their account, they will need to enable Two-Factor-Authentication

2FA is a crucial part of keeping your website secure. We recommend that when you initially create accounts for new users, you should only give them Subscriber access and wait for them to set up 2FA before elevating their permissions (always good to give people an incentive…:p)

The first step to setting up 2FA is to download Google Authentication on your phone. This app can be found on both Google Play and the Apple App Store.

Once the app is installed, instruct them to click on the plus icon at the bottom of the screen and then select “Scan QR code”.

Now back to the CMS. Users can finish setting up 2FA by going to the Two-Factor-Auth tab in the CMS.

They can use their phone to scan the QR code on this page so that your site is listed in their app. The temporary code that shows up in the app should match the one that shows up on the screen. Once this has been checked, they can select the “Enabled” box and “Save Changes.”

Once 2FA is set up, the user will need to enter the 6 digit code on their phone every time they log in. This code will change every minute.

As a website administrator, you have access to a lot of different settings and options that other CMS users can’t see. Most of these settings don’t need to be changed very often, if at all, and are generally most helpful when you are setting up your site for the first time.

Once you become an administrator, you will be able to change some of the options in the Appearance, Users, Settings, Yoast SEO and Theme Options tabs.

You can update and create your menus in the Appearance settings section of the CMS.

Select the menu that you would like to edit, using the Menu Name dropdown bar.

By default, you will have a Main Menu, Footer Legal, Footer Main and Site Selector built into your site.

You can also create additional menus that can be used with the Menu block.

It’s important to remember that your audiences will be accessing your site from various devices, which means you should try to keep your menus small and keep your menu item names short.

You can add pages, posts, categories and custom URLs to your Menu.

As a general principle, it is better to only include links to pages on your site to your menus. It can be a complicated user experience to click on a menu item and be redirected to another website and it means that users will spend less time on your site.

You can add child menu items underneath parent menu items so that when you hover over a menu, you can reveal a drop-down submenu.

The parent menu items in the footer menu will not look like a link in the footer (although it will still work like one.) We recommend that you use these as titles for the different sub-menus in your Footer. For example, if you want to have a list of your social media accounts in your footer menu, you would add “Follow Us” as the parent menu Item and “Facebook”, “Twitter”, and “Instagram” as child items.

Your site title and site tagline are important parts of your site identity. They are key to helping search engines figure out what your site is for and how to list it in search engine result pages.

The site title can also be seen in the tab in your browser.

You can change your Site Title and Tagline in the Appearance tab by going to the Customize section and then to Site Identity. Don’t forget to publish your changes!

You can change some of the general website settings such as site language, timezone, date format or time format from the Settings tab.

Selecting the correct site language is an important factor in search engine optimization, so double check this setting to make sure it matches your content. If you are using the multi-site function to have multiple language versions of your content, you will need to go into the site settings for each language site and change the language.

The timezone that you use will impact the timestamp that appears on your Posts and will also be the timezone that is used when you schedule your content to publish at a specific time in the future

When a new post is created, it will be categorized as “Uncategorized” by default. If you would like to change this to something else, you can select a different Default Post Category in the “Writing” section of the Settings tab.

If you don’t want your website to be indexed by search engines, you can select the “Search Engine Visibility” checkbox in the “Reading” section of the “Settings” tab.

All of your posts will follow the same URL pattern which can be built in the “Permalinks” section under the “Settings” tab. Permalinks are very important for search engine optimisation as they give search engines an indication of how different content relates to other content.

For instance, if you want to optimise your content for Google News, you will need to have a date structure in the URL for your news content.

You can also incorporate categories into your permalink structure. For instance, if you select “News” as your primary category the URL of the post will be domain.org/news/post-name.

Keep in mind that your URLs should not be too long.

The URL structure that you decide to use should not change after your site goes live. Doing this will remove any search authority that your posts have already generated.

If you have questions about the most strategic way to set up your permalinks, please contact us at [email protected]

Administrators also have access to Yoast SEO tab.

If you go to the General settings section of the Yoast SEO tab, you can see a dashboard that will show you any problems or notifications relating to search engine optimisation on your site. For instance, if your site is blocked from search engine crawls, you will be notified here.

You can add your Google verification code (which you can find using Google Search Engine Console) by clicking on the Webmaster Tools

You can add links to various social media platforms in the Yoast Social settings. This is important in making sure that your social media accounts are associated with your website in the Google Knowledge Graph. That way, when people search for your website, those accounts will be listed in the Knowledge panel.

Both website administrators and editors can access the redirects section of the CMS, but it is extra useful for administrators who will probably be asked to “fix” broken links and be working on improving SEO across the site.

More information on using the Yoast SEO plug in and SEO more generally will be available in our SEO guide.

There are various places in the CMS where you will probably want to add links to your social media accounts. You may have them featured in a menu or have them listed in your Yoast settings (more information on that in the section of the guide above this one!)

However the social media link settings that impact your site the most are in the Theme Options.

You can change your logo, logomark and the colour and call to action in your menu in the Theme Options tab.

The Logo is found in the top left-hand corner of every page and your CTA is in the top right hand side (unless your website is RTL instead of LTR in which case it will be swapped!)

When selecting an image to use for your logo, make sure you check to see how it looks once you add it. Adding an image that is too tall will make your menu look a bit glitchy.

Same goes for the text in your CTA button. You don’t want it to be too long.

The logomark is the icon that shows up in the tab of your browser.

Don’t forget that you can change the rest of your menu by going to the Menu section of the Appearance tab. More information on that in this guide if you scroll up a bit.

If you use a Standard Post template to create a new page, the default sidebar will be used to fill the sidebar section of the page.

You can set your default sidebar in the “Theme Options” section of the CMS (keep scrolling down past the social media and header settings!)

Users can go in manually and select different sidebars that are more specific to their content.

We recommend that you use a generic “Join Amnesty” or “Donate” sidebar as your Default side bar.

You can learn more about sidebars here

If you are using tracking tools such as Google Analytics, VWO or Hotjar, you will need to link them up to your site in the Analytics section of the “Theme Options” section of the CMS.

Each of those tools will generate IDs or scripts for you and all you need to do to link them to your site is paste in the IDs/scripts here.

Most of the content in your footer can be changed in the Footer Menu when you go through the Appearance section of the CMS (more information on that in the menu section of this guide.) However, you need to go to the “Footer Options” section of the “Theme Options.”

You can change the Title, Section Content, Button Text and link here.