WordPress School: WordPress Login

The word login is a strange word with an odd spelling, yet it is the gateway to our online world. We have to login to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, email, even our computers now require logins for security purposes. WordPress also has a login – many, in fact. Today’s assignment and tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School covers most of them.

In the 11+ years of training and teaching WordPress, I’m fascinating with the complicated methods people use to reach their WordPress site. Here is a short list of some of their methods.

• Sign into their email and search for the confirmation email used to register their site and click the login link
• Sign into their web hosting account and dig through layers of web pages in the server control panels to reach the WordPress access point
• Click the bookmark of a web page on their site, not always the front page, and change the address to the login address

Go to WordPress.com and click Sign Up for a New Blog. Go through the process to get a new site, get the email confirmation, and login, only to find out that they cannot gain access to their original site because they’ve just added another separate WordPress.com account…this happens more than you would think. I have one client with six or seven WordPress.com logins for different sites. He just kept creating new ones assuming he didn’t save the previous one or WordPress.com lost it.

And there are more but I’ll save you and make it easy.

To log into your WordPress site simply type in the address of your site and the words “login” after:

http://example.com/login

Enter your username and password to access the site.

The url redirects to the default login address:

http://example.com/wp-login.php

You may access the login page from this address as well:

http://example.com/wp-admin

To log into a WordPress.com site, the options are the same, changing the example.com to yoursitename.wordpress.com.

Occasionally a WordPress site will be installed in a folder on the web host server that is not the root folder. This adds a folder or directory name to the URL with the rest of the login path the same:

http://example.com/home/login

WordPress.com users may also just go to WordPress.com and login through the button there.

WordPress.com users with multiple sites have a single login for all of the sites. Use the Manage My Blogs or new My Site > Switch Sites menu access.

How to Sign Out of WordPress

I’ve explained the basics of how to log into WordPress, but how do you log out?

Go to the Gravatar image in the upper right corner of the WordPress Admin Screen and hover or click with your mouse (dependent upon the screen you are viewing).

A drop down will appear with the option to sign out.

If you are at your personal computer at home or office with little or no change of someone accessing it, you don’t have to log out every time. If you are in a public or open space, log out to be safe.

Single Sign On with WordPress.com and WordPress.org

Jetpack WordPress Plugin recently announced WordPress.com Single Sign On for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress sites.

Once activated in Jetpack, your site members also have a complementary account with WordPress.com. Beyond security issues and easy access to WordPress.com Stats and other WordPress.com benefits available to self-hosted WordPress users, the best benefit is one login for all your WordPress sites no matter where they are hosted.

For someone with many sites to keep track of, this makes life so much easier.

Is it risky? WordPress.com keeps up with security updates 24/7 plus. This adds another layer of protect to your site’s login, an improvement over you, the sole administrator of your site, defending access to your site. It also helps when trying to remember all those user names and passwords.

Front End Access

Is a Link to Login Dangerous?

Displaying a link to login to your WordPress site on the front end of your site isn’t a security risk. Having a weak username and password is, as is not keeping your site updated. There are WordPress Plugins to increase the security of the login link, but visible or not, the login link is the same for every WordPress site. If you would like to change the address of the login, there are tutorials and Plugins, but this has been found to also be fairly ineffective but is an option.

If you are working with a multiple contributor site, you may have many members (users) on the site and wish to provide an easier way to log into the site. There are two methods in WordPress.

The easiest is to use the Text WordPress Widget to create a link to the site’s login address using the example link above.

You may also create a graphic to log into the site and wrap the link around it to increase the visibility of the access point.

There is also a WordPress Widget called Meta that adds the login link and other links to a Widgetized area on the site. This used to be activated automatically with most WordPress Themes, but it has gone into disfavor as few sites have more than one contributor, and it is a bit clunky.

As we progress forward with Lorelle’s WordPress School, you will learn that I not only teach WordPress from the inside out but I have a very strong rule that WordPress designers, developers, and administrators should do nothing to make WordPress harder and get in the way of a visitor’s access to the site. Adding a login to the front of the site makes it easy for people to access the site, especially if you require registration and login for participation, access to specific content, or contributions.

WordPress Login Resources

Thousands Visit My Login

Ever freak out reading your web host statistics and find over 5,000 people tried to access your WordPress site.

Relax. I wish I could say that this is normal. There is nothing normal about it, nor human. Humans aren’t doing this. Bots are. Hackers are. Trust me, you aren’t that famous…yet. 😀

The login address is well-known and a target for hackers. WordPress out-of-the-box is secure enough to fight off most of them as long as you cooperate with a strong username and password, and keep the site updated. There are Plugins you can use to tighten it down, but WordPress usually stands up against them well.

So relax, a little. Protect and defend your site as much as possible and let WordPress do the rest.

There are many ways to customize the look and feel of the WordPress login, but that’s way down the line in Lorelle’s WordPress School. Most of these require familiarity with WordPress Themes and Child Themes, HTML and CSS, PHP, and JavaScript, or the use of WordPress Plugins.

For more information on WordPress logins:

• Beginner’s Guide: How to Find Your WordPress Login URL – WPBeginners
• Security and Logins — Support — WordPress.com
• How To Customise The WordPress Login Page – Paulund
• Change the WordPress Login Page URL to Improve Security – WP White Security
• WordPress Auditing – Monitor Your Websites Activity – Sucuri Blog
• How To: Allow users to Login to WordPress using Github – WPLift

Assignment

Your assignment is to log in and out of your site several times experimenting with the different login access points.

If you would like to experiment with the WordPress Widgets, add the Meta Widget to the sidebar and remove it to see how that works. Experiment with the Text Widget to add a link or image. HTML familiarity required.

Join us in our discussions on this assignment in our WordPress School Google+ Community and tell us how you log into WordPress. I’ve found some fascinating methods, some straight, some twisted, to get to a WordPress and WordPress.com site. What’s your journey?

This is a tutorial from Lorelle’s WordPress School. For more information, and to join this free, year-long, online WordPress School, see:

• Lorelle’s WordPress School Introduction
• Lorelle’s WordPress School Description
• WordPress School Tutorials List
• WordPress School Google+ Community
• WordPress Publishing Checklist
• How to Give Feedback and Criticism

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