3 Tricks to Customize the WordPress Login

Translated by Núria Adell.

One of the aspects you use the most in WordPress, and that I’m sure you haven’t thought much about, is the login page. Yes, the famous /wp-admin/ you add to the URL of your website and which provides access to the WordPress Dashboard after filling in the corresponding username and password.

As with other aspects of WordPress, the login can be modified in different ways. In this post I will briefly explain 3 tricks to modify the WordPress login page, which you might find useful. Without further delay, here we go…

Trick 1: Change the access URL to WordPress

If you want to make it harder for WordPress attackers, one of the available options to improve the security of your website is changing the default URL to access your Dashboard.

In case you didn’t know, which would surprise me at this point, the default website address to access the login form of WordPress is http://yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/. Adding /wp-admin/ at the end of the URL (or /wp-login.php), you can access the form by default. If you want to avoid attackers trying to destroy your server by doing thousands of petitions to this form URL, you can do so by changing /wp-admin/ to a different route.

To do so, if you’re not a .htaccess genius, it’s best to use a plugin. In the WordPress plugin directory you will find many, but perhaps one of the simplest and most popular ones is WPS Hide Login. You just have to install and activate it to make it work. From here, your URL login form will change from /wp-admin/ to /login.

And you can always change the route to any other one accessing the menu Settings » General of WordPress itself. Additionally, if you try to access /wp-admin/ or /wp-login.php you will see they stop working as soon as the plugin is activated.

On the other hand, if you want a much more complete solution (but also more complex) you can opt for a security plugin such as iThemes Security, which includes, amongst other features, the block of URLs with administrative access.

Trick 2: Add your logo on the WordPress login

Corporate image is very important. This is why if you need a lot of visitors to enter and register as users into your website, it is very useful to add the logo of your organization by modifying the login page of WordPress.

As you can see below, the login form of WordPress shows the WordPress logo by default. Changing this is easy, believe me.

The following fragment of PHP code, which you can directly add into the functions.php file of your theme, shows how to change the logo to personalize the WordPress login form.

The first part of the code (lines 1 to 12) add an additional CSS style that overwrites the default style of WordPress and adds your chosen image on top of the form.

You just have to add an image to the img folder of your theme with the name you want and change the 4th line of the previous code as convenient. If you use a squared image of 84 pixels, you won’t have to modify anything else. Otherwise, you can always change the CSS rules to better adjust everything.

You can see the result on the screenshot above, where we have changed the WordPress logo by ours. In addition, lines 14 to 17 change the link of the logo so that it leads to your home page, and lines 19 to 22 change your title to the new image’s.

Having your WordPress personalized is this simple. If you want to do more complex things, have a look at Codex, where they explain much more on the topic.

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Trick 3: Allow register with other social network accounts

Don’t deny it, remembering each of your passwords is very annoying. And if it is for you, imagine for someone who is not as used to the Internet as you are. Hence, if you need to increase the number of users of your website, why don’t you allow them to register using their Google account, or their Facebook profile, or even their Twitter one? This way they will be able to login without having to remember a new password, and you will get more users.

Doing all of this by yourself is quite complicated, since communicating with different social networks is not trivial. Believe me, I know what I am talking about since I have suffered it during the development of the cloud of Nelio Content.

Luckily, there’s a plugin that solves the problem. It’s called WordPress Social Login, and it does precisely what I am talking about. On top of that, the creator encourages you to help him improve the plugin directly from his GitHub repository.

When installing it, you just have to configure the social networks you want to set up and from then on your visitors will be able to register using their social networks profiles. I absolutely recommend it if you’re currently in need of this feature.

Final summary

In this post you have learnt how to make your WordPress installation a bit more secure by changing the default access URLs to others which are harder to find and will make life more difficult for possible attackers.

Furthermore, you have also seen how to personalize the login form by changing the WordPress logo to your own. Now you have no excuse to give your installation this personalized touch! ?

Finally, you have seen how to make life easier for your users by allowing them to register to your WordPress with the same credentials they use on social networks such as Google or Facebook.

These may seem easy and well-known tricks, but there are many people who are still frequently asking for them. Now that you have learnt them, don’t doubt putting them in practice for the login of your WordPress installation or that of your clients.

Featured Image by Pexels.