The MyKinsta dashboard explained
A plain-English tour of the MyKinsta control panel — what each section does and where to find key features for managing your site.
MyKinsta is widely considered one of the most elegant and well-organized hosting dashboards available. Here's a guide to what you'll find and how to navigate it.
Quick summary
The MyKinsta dashboard is organized around your sites. Click a site name to open its detailed management view, where you'll find sections for Info, Staging, Backups, Redirects, Domains, and more. Analytics and performance tools are built into the dashboard.
The MyKinsta home screen
After logging in, you'll see an overview of all your sites. For each site, you can see:
- The site name and URL
- Current status (live or paused)
- A quick link to open the site's management view
Click a site name to enter its management dashboard.
Site overview (Info tab)
The site overview shows a summary of your hosting environment:
- Site URL — your live domain
- PHP version — the server-side language version in use (for technical reference)
- WordPress admin link — a direct shortcut to log in to WordPress
- Resource usage — visits, bandwidth, disk space, and PHP requests for the current billing period
- Environment selector — switch between Live and Staging
Key sections in the site dashboard
Staging
Kinsta's staging environment is accessible from a tab or section within your site's management view. From here you can:
- Create a staging environment — copies the live site to staging
- Push staging to live — deploys tested changes to production
- Clear staging cache
See staging on Kinsta for a full walkthrough.
Backups
The Backups section shows all available backups with timestamps. You can:
- View automatic daily backups
- Create a manual backup
- Restore to a previous backup
- Download a backup
See backups on Kinsta.
Redirects
Kinsta allows creating server-level redirects (301, 302) directly from the dashboard. This is more reliable than plugin-based redirects. We manage this for you.
Domains
Lists all domains connected to the site. From here you can add a custom domain, set the primary domain, and manage domain-specific SSL.
SSL
Shows SSL certificate status for each connected domain. Kinsta provides free Cloudflare SSL certificates on all plans. See SSL on Kinsta.
Analytics
One of MyKinsta's standout features is its built-in analytics dashboard. It shows:
- Visits over time — traffic trends for the current period
- Cache hit ratio — how effectively caching is working
- Top 404 errors — URLs returning page-not-found errors
- Bandwidth usage — data sent to visitors
- PHP processing time — how fast your server responds
This is genuinely useful business intelligence — not just technical data.
Tools
The Tools section includes:
- Cache clearing — purge all cached pages in one click
- APM (Application Performance Monitoring) — detailed performance analysis
- Search & Replace — a database find-and-replace tool (for developer use)
- PHP engine restart — for troubleshooting (we handle this)
Activity Log
A record of all actions taken on the site — backups, cache clears, environment pushes, and user changes. Useful for auditing.
Common questions
Related guides
- Kinsta hosting: overview
- Logging in to MyKinsta
- Staging on Kinsta
- Backups on Kinsta
- Caching on Kinsta
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