As you probably know already, WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in the world. One of the factors that brought its success is the open-source principle which stayed at its base from the 1st day. This little detail(and probably the fact that it was built on PHP as well) made possible the development of a culture around WordPress, powered by creative and like-minded people. The results, tons of plugins and themes to power-up the WordPress core.
Because WordPress is so versatile, today, we’re going to discuss ways that you could customize the default WordPress login page. Because you’ve either got tired of seeing the same login page over and over again or maybe because you’re running a little community of users and contributors around your website, getting a revamp of the login page should be on your to-do list.
For a beginner, building a WordPress site may seem like an overwhelming task. But, in fact, it becomes easier when you do it on a reliable host like 000webhost. Just like web hosting is an important factor when building a site, a feature like a login page also plays an important role for an enhanced user experience.
Using a custom login page for your WordPress website is one of those little tricks that adds up to a great user experience.
The only way to get into the WordPress dashboard is through the login page. But providing limited access to users into the dashboard(i.e: subscribers, contributors) via the same login page you’re using to manage advanced stuff might sound like an usability or even security issue. That’s why it’s important to clarify such things right-of-the-bat by customizing the login page.
If you’re looking for a few alternatives in which you could get the wp admin login page customized then this post is just right for you.
3 Reasons Why a Custom Login Page is a Great Idea
WordPress is an amazing CMS platform which doesn’t require a high learning curve. If you are unfamiliar with your WordPress login page, then this post from 000webhost.com might come in handy.
A few reasons which might require a custom login page could be for:
- Maintaining a high-level of security by keeping users out of your wp-login.php page.
- Improve the user experience by creating a front-end login page or by using frontend login widgets. This specific case usually applies to eCommerce and community websites.
- Increasing brand consistency and awareness by customizing the login page according to the brand’s identity. If you’re building websites for clients, this simple trick should sweeten-up the deal.
Ways of Customizing the WordPress Login Experience
Now, the title of this post says that you don’t need any coding skills to customize the WordPress login process so I’m going to stick to this idea. Therefore, I’m going to show you 2 ways of revamping the way you’re getting into the WordPress dashboard.
1. Customize the WordPress Login Page
This is simple. You want to transform the boring wp-login.php page into something more appealing. Adding a fancy logo and setting up a surreal background image is on your to-do list, I know 🙂
If you head over to https://yourwebsite.com/wp-login.php(obviously, replace the yourwebsite.com with your own URL), you should get welcomed by this page:
Boring, isn’t it? Let’s change that. For this example, I’ll be using a plugin called Custom Login Page by Seedprod. There are other plugins which can do that, exemplified below, but the reason why I chose this one over the others is that it’s free, it has a live editor and allows me to have the logo outside of the login page. It also has a premium version which comes with plenty of other options.
I recommend you giving a try to the Login Designer Plugin as well – stumbled upon it a few weeks after I published the article and found it to be more feature-rich and user-oriented than the rest.
Step 1: Install and Activate the Plugins
Step 2: Once the plugin installed and activated, go to Settings->Login Page and hit the ” Click to Customize Your Login Page” button.
Step 3: Do your magic!
If you’re wondering what settings and options I used, here they are: a custom logo(actually the logo of my theme, Monde, which you can download it from free here), the Courier, monospace typeform, #323232 for button colors and links. The image used was taken from Unsplash, obviously, and is by the talented Brooke Lark.
The result?
That’s quite a difference, isn’t it? It took me less than 5 minutes to get things looking like that.
Plugins for Customizing the WordPress Login Page
There are a couple of plugins which you could try out for this task.
- Custom Login Page by SeedProd – used in the above example, comes with a live editor and makes things pretty easy.
- Custom Login Page Customizer | LoginPress – the free version is a bit more advanced than the one by SeedProd(more styling options and fields for custom text) and the pro version really makes the difference(comes with predefined templates, reCaptcha and some nice addons for even more power).
- Admin Custom Login – the most powerful free plugin when it comes to features, compared to the above 2 plugins. The downside is that it doesn’t come up with the live editor, so a minus for user-experience. But overall, if you’re willing to play with it for a few more minutes, you’ll be able to customize the login page as you want it, not being limited by it.
2. Create an Alternative Frontend Login Page
Let’s say you don’t want to have people access your wp-login.php page or you want to run a community site. In these cases, you want to allow users to log into their account directly from the website, either from a separate page or from a widget.
Let’s do that. Again, no coding skills required here so it means we’re going be using a plugin here called Theme My Login.
Head over to Plugins->Add New, search for “Theme My Login” and install and activate the plugin:
What I love about it is that it works out of the box! Once activated, the plugin will automatically create a series of user pages for Log In, Log Out, Lost Password, Reset Password, Your Profile, and Register.
If you check them out, the login forms or the elements associated to your profile are listed on those pages. This is how the login form looks like.
So what the plugin did after the installation? Well, it created those frontend features you were looking for. In other words, you can now log in to WordPress by heading over to https://yoursite.com/login/
If you want to have a more granular control over what the plugin does, head over to TML->General in the dashboard and activate the modules. Now you’ll be able to customize user emails for registration and/or password recovery, allow users to set their own password upon registration, require users to be approved or confirm e-mail address upon registration, theme user profiles, redirect users to certain pages once logged in – pretty awesome stuff. Plus, the plugin comes with a widget as well – making the login or registration process a breeze, by placing the widget straight into your sidebars.
Wrapping Up
For many people out there, the WordPress dashboard is the place they spend the most of their time, at home or at work. Even if the WordPress login process is as user-friendly as you get, bringing in that extra something into it should make us feel a little bit better – after all, the human behavior is a problem-solving mechanism and it’s our job to make sure that we feed it with the right tasks! Did I just enter on a mined field? Let me know in the comments below!
