The Flywheel dashboard explained
A plain-English tour of the Flywheel site dashboard — what each section does and where to find key features.
Once you're logged in to Flywheel and have clicked on your site, you'll see the site dashboard. This is your control center for that WordPress installation. Here's what everything means.
Quick summary
The Flywheel site dashboard shows your site's status, visits, and storage at a glance. From here you can access WordPress admin, view backups, manage SSL, enable staging, and control who has access to your site.
The main site dashboard
When you open a site in Flywheel, you'll typically see a summary view at the top with:
- Visit count — how many visitors your site has received recently.
- Storage used — how much of your plan's storage is in use.
- Site status — whether your site is live, paused, or in staging mode.
- A link to your WordPress admin — a quick shortcut to log in to WordPress directly.
Below that, navigation items (often in a sidebar or tabs) take you to specific sections.
Key sections explained
Overview
The overview shows your site's vital stats. It's the first thing you see and gives you a quick health check. If anything needs attention — like an expiring SSL certificate — Flywheel will flag it here.
Staging
This is where you create and manage your staging site — a private copy of your website for testing changes. From here you can:
- Create a staging site — copies your live site to a staging environment.
- Push to live — replaces the live site with the staging version after testing.
- Copy live to staging — refreshes staging with the current live site content.
See staging sites on Flywheel for a full walkthrough.
Backups
The backups section shows your backup history. Flywheel creates automatic daily backups. You can:
- View the list of available backups with timestamps.
- Restore a backup with one click.
- Download a backup to your computer.
See backups on Flywheel.
SSL
The SSL section shows the status of your HTTPS certificate. It displays:
- Whether SSL is active.
- The certificate expiry date.
- Options to add or manage your SSL certificate.
On well-configured sites, this should just say "Active" and you don't need to do anything. See SSL on Flywheel.
Domains
Here you can see and manage the domain name(s) connected to your site. This is where you'd add a custom domain or check which domain is set as the primary one.
Collaborators
This section lists who has access to the site (beyond the main account owner). You can add or remove collaborators here. Each collaborator gets their own Flywheel login with access to this specific site.
When you need to give us access, add support@chykalophia.com as a collaborator — unless your project lead has specified a different address.
Site settings
Site settings contains configuration options including:
- PHP version (for technical reference — we manage this)
- Access credentials for SFTP (file transfer — for developer use)
- The option to pause or delete the site
Don't delete your site from here
The delete option permanently removes your site and all its backups from Flywheel. Never click it unless you are absolutely certain and have your own copies. If you're unsure, contact us first.
Common questions
Related guides
- Flywheel hosting: overview
- Logging in to Flywheel
- Staging sites on Flywheel
- Backups on Flywheel
- SSL on Flywheel
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