Improve the WordPress dashboard

Deskmode Pro Suite started there. Not from a feature list drawn up in a meeting, but from a series of concrete problems met while looking after sites for other people, and solved one at a time.

One plugin instead of many

The usual way to fix the dashboard is to stack single-purpose plugins: one for the theme, one to hide notices, one for the activity log, one for backups, one for login security. Five plugins that overlap, sometimes conflict, each with its own settings panel somewhere different.

Deskmode replaces them with a single install. Not because doing everything is better on principle, but because these things talk to each other: the activity log records login blocks, the health screen uses the same data, the theme also covers the login page. Keeping them apart means duplicating both information and configuration.

What actually changes, screen by screen

The dashboard gets a look. A clean theme with twelve accents, a real dark mode — not a filter that inverts colours, but a theme that respects third-party plugins' coloured panels — your logo instead of the WordPress one, and a footer carrying your agency's name rather than the default thank-you note.

The menu becomes yours. Hide entries you don't need, reorder them, restrict visibility by role. A client logging in to update three pages does not need twenty entries they cannot use.

Notices go away. All those coloured strips plugins push to the top of every screen are collected into a single expandable line. They are still there, just not in front of you while you work.

The login defends itself. Two-factor authentication, attempt limits, country filtering, allowed hours, reCAPTCHA or Turnstile. Plus a log that gives you, for every event, the IP address, country, network owner, user and exact time.

The site explains itself. A health score with the reasons spelled out, a performance chart, which plugins slow your pages down and which ones contact external servers. Plus database checks and search-and-replace for migrations, with a mandatory preview before anything is written.

Backups go where you say. To your own S3 bucket or your own FTP, not to our servers. We never see them and never keep them.

What we don't do

No telemetry, no usage statistics, no phoning home. The features that do reach outside — IP geolocation, vulnerability scanning, shared reputation — are all off by default and documented one by one, with what they send and when.

That seems the least you can expect from a tool that lives inside your clients' admin panel.

Who it comes from

Deskmode is built by 3WEB, who have been building and maintaining websites since 1999. Nearly every feature in the plugin started as a problem on a real site rather than a line on a roadmap — which is why some are very specific, and some you might expect are not there at all.