One of the most common queries we usually get from clients revolves around having trouble finding where to edit particular pages, images or general content in the WordPress dashboard (or some call the “backend”).
This blog will hopefully help you narrow down your options of where to look and on top teach you a little about the anatomy of WordPress.
Where to start?
First of all, gather all the clues and start with the most obvious locations. By clues, I am referring to unique (or unique as possible) content which is distinct to that particular page or content. This would usually be a title, sentence, a slug, an image or even just positioning, i.e is it in the header? is it in a sidebar? is it a widget?
The first thing would be the look at the title or slug of the page…
What is a slug?
The slug is the ending of the pages URL / permalink for example – https://umidigital.co.uk/blog – ‘/blog’ would be the slug.
In the above case you would go into pages and look or do a search for a page with the same title as the page or do a search for ‘blogs’ and you should be able to match a page with the slug by looking at its permalink.
This is especially useful to differentiate between pages with the same name as that can sometimes happen!
2 pages called blogs will usually produce – ‘/blog’ and ‘/blog-2’ automatically.
But my slug is double-barrelled or multi-barrelled…
Ok, no problem!
This would usually mean the page is a subpage (a child of another page, usually made for drop-down nav items) or it is a post or custom post type.
What is a Custom Post type (CPT)?
So as you may know your WordPress site has ‘posts’ and ‘pages’, but what happens if you want a completely new category to separate your content like ‘offers’ or ‘rooms’?
This is where CPT’s come in, as the name suggests it is a custom ‘post’ category to achieve just that!
So, for example, the permalink of this page – https://umidigital.co.uk/blog/finding-wordpress-content
This would USUALLY mean it is a post about finding WordPress content which can be found inside a CPT called ‘blog’ or just a regular post.
Where to find or insert images
This is one of the most common issues, but the good thing is, looking for a picture is much easier than looking for a word. This section should be useful if you are trying to find where to change a background image, slider image or header image etc.
First thing would be to find the page or post in question and look at the ‘featured-image’ section which can be found on the right of posts and pages. Insert an image here and see if it displays on your page.
If this doesn’t work, scan the backend of the page and see if there are any places where you can add an image, so basically look for ‘add image’ buttons.
If you still can’t find anywhere to add an image on the page that could mean it is somewhere else altogether.
In this case, you would need to look at the dashboard and see if there are any options / CPTs which are related to images. This would usually be something called ‘slider’, ‘gallery’, ‘images’, it could be anything but if the site has been coded well it will be something obvious or related to the page in question.
This is quite common for animated images, such as slideshows, galleries or carousels. For example, it could be something like a CPT called ‘Slider’ and inside will be posts which correlate with each image in a slide. Also as mentioned before if this doesn’t work look for add image buttons on these post pages.
By this point you should have been able to find the image, if not and you are looking for your site’s logo that most likely will be found in your site’s ‘theme options’, ‘theme settings’ or the ‘footer’ / ‘header’ sections under ‘Appearance’ in the dashboard.
Finding Content
This can be found in a similar way as mentioned above. If you go to the page in question which has the content, it would usually be there.
If not, see if it is in any associated CPTs. For example, if the page is about a ‘room’ of your hotel look for a CPT called ‘room’ or related to rooms and usually you will be able to find the content of that page after digging around.
Super Helpful Tip!
CTRL + F – microsoft
CMD + F – Mac
This is the shortcut to search on the page and it is one of the most useful shortcuts for finding things on a page instantly. You could use it to find “add images” or even a whole sentence that you are looking for on a page.
Just use CTRL/CMD + F and a search box will appear where you can search for ANYTHING on the page that matches what you type.
This is incredibly useful if the page is excruciatingly long, so you don’t have to read every line on the page!
We really hope this post helped a little – if not, just call the office or drop us an email at support@umidigital.co.uk – we’d love to help!