The Best Plugins to Improve the WordPress Admin

In general, I don’t recommend messing with the default WordPress admin appearance too much. These plugins tidy up your admin area or add helpful notes.

Admin Columns ★

I hate it when plugins add columns to the “All Pages” and “All Posts” feeds in the admin, cluttering them up with useless info (I’m looking at you, Yoast SEO). Admin Columns lets you purge useless columns. You can instead display custom fields in the columns – really useful for customizing! I use this plugin on almost every site I make. The paid version is even more amazing, allowing you to do advanced filtering and even bulk custom field editing right from the list view!

Login Page Customizer

I haven’t tested this yet, but it’s got excellent reviews; saving for a client who wants to customize their login page.

Plugin Notes

This is something I could have used on many client sites where the client sometimes installed strange plugins. It allows you to add notes such as why a plugin was installed and who installed it.

WP Help (not recommended on Siteground hosting, see below)

Create help notes in the admin area for your clients.  Document custom post types, custom fields, weird plugins, whatever you want.  I use this on almost every site now, both for my clients and for myself, when I’ve forgotten how the site works six months from now.

Update: WP Help Plugin Not Working on Siteground

Sometime around March 2025, this plugin stopped working for many of my sites. The images, JS and CSS files all had 403 errors in the WP Help admin page.

I suspected the problem was caused by a server-level security setting on Siteground hosting since I didn’t have this problem on local or other web hosts. So, I got on chat with SG support. They swapped out the .htaccess file, and had me disable WordFence and the SG Speed Optimizer plugin to no avail. Finally, he elevated the issue by creating a ticket, and as I suspected, it was a server-level issue as explained by a senior Siteground tech:

Indeed, there is a Security rule against the URI for wp-help that was added since there was previous exploits with this plugin that caused issues for some of our clients and as such a security rule was created in order to prevent them.

Seeing as you have an additional WordFence security plugin I have made an exception and disabled the rule in question for you.

The plugin should now work as expected in your WP Admin.

Unfortunately, this fix can only be done by Siteground, and perhaps only by a senior technical support agent (not the folks you get on chat). For this reason, I recommend that you don’t use this plugin on Siteground hosting.

Conclusion

Questions? Did a miss a good plugin that you know of? Please leave a comment below! – Brian

Brian Shim

I am a freelance web developer and consultant based in Santa Monica, CA. I’ve been designing websites using WordPress and from scratch using HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript since 2010. I create websites and web applications for businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from California Institute of Technology and a degree in Engineering Management (MSEM) from Stanford University.

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