Time Saving WordPress Shortcuts

If you want to take your WordPress blogging to a whole new level of proficiency, it’s time you learned the many different keyboard shortcuts that are built into WordPress. No plugins needed, this is just another bit of awesome that? is WordPress.

Basic knowledge

If you want to highlight a word or phrase, you have to lift your palm from the keyboard, grab the mouse (or touchpad), highlight the text, move the mouse over the I button and click it. That’s a lot of work for simply italicizing a piece of text. That’s where the Ctrl+I keyboard combination comes in handy!

WordPress comes with a “What You See Is What You Get” (WISIWYG) editor. It is an interactive rich text editor which supports a plethora of rich text activities – such as highlighting text, bullet points, headings, block quotes, etc. But you already know this.

What you probably did not know that Ctrl+K combination opens up the hyperlink dialogue box. Enter the URL, and the definition and your text is hyperlinked without a mouse click! If you like what you’ve read, check out the following awesome WordPress keyboard shortcuts.

Prerequisites

It is a well-known fact that many themes and plugins add their own shortcode buttons to the Visual Editor. While this is certainly helpful to most of us, we have completely omitted this in our tutorial. This guarantees that everyone gets an equal base to learn from.

• We haven’t installed any new plugin or theme that adds extra buttons or posts in the Visual Editor.
• If you don’t have a clean installation of WordPress, you can simply visit WordPress.com and try out the authentic Visual Editor over there!
• Finally, if you’re using a Mac, then there’s no Ctrl key. Simply replace the Ctrl key with the Command key wherever applicable. All other shortcuts work as shown in this tutorial.

Kitchen Sink

First things first. You need to open the Kitchen Sink. This tiny feature reveals a whole other line of options to help you make the most of the post interface, such as font styles, copy and pasting from Word and one of my favourites, removing formatting.

You can easily toggle the Kitchen Sink on and off to display an extra line of options for styling your text.

And the option we’re after is Help. So either click the button or hit Shift + Alt + H.

The Rich Editor Help window will open. Click on Hotkeys to reveal some shortcut goodness.

No more having to click the B button with your mouse to make some text bold! There’s also no need to switch out of the Visual editor and into the Text editor to enclose < h2 > tabs around a heading. And instead of click Add Media to insert an image in your post you can simply hit Command + M for iOS or CTRL + M for Windows to quickly bring up the media manager. Sweet!

But that’s not all. There are even more shortcuts that aren’t displayed in Rich Editor Help.

WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts for Visual Post Editor

WordPress comes with a slightly modified version of Tiny MCE editor. It appears on the Visual tab in your WordPress post editor. It is a rich text editor with formatting buttons much like MS Office. Many beginner level users use their mouse to access these formatting and styling buttons on the editor. Using keyboard shortcuts you can rest your hands on keyboard and edit posts quicker. Mac users can use Command key instead of Ctrl.

• Ctrl + b = Bold
• Ctrl + i = Italic
• Ctrl + c = Copy
• Ctrl + v = Paste
• Ctrl + x = Cut
• Ctrl + a = Select All
• Ctrl + z = Undo
• Ctrl + y = Redo
• Ctrl + [number] = Insert heading sizes, e.g. CTRL+1 = <h1>, CTRL+2 = <h2>.
• Alt + Shift + n = Check Spelling
• Alt + Shift + l = Align Left
• Alt + Shift + j = Justify Text
• Alt + Shift + c = Align Center
• Alt + Shift + d = Strikethrough
• Alt + Shift + r = Align Right
• Alt + Shift + u = Unordered List
• Alt + Shift + a = Insert link
• Alt + Shift + o = Numeric List
• Alt + Shift + s = Remove link
• Alt + Shift + q = Quote
• Alt + Shift + m = Insert Image
• Alt + Shift + w = Full screen distraction free writing mode
• Alt + Shift + t = Insert More Tag
• Alt + Shift + p = Insert Page Break tag
• Alt + Shift + h = Rich text editor help

WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts for Plain Text Editor

Plain text editor is a simple text editor that appears on your post editor under the Text tab. It has some very basic formatting buttons and you can see all the html in the editor. There are just a few shortcuts for plain text editor in WordPress.

• Ctrl + c = Copy
• Ctrl + v = Paste
• Ctrl + x = Cut
• Ctrl + z = Undo
• Ctrl + y = Redo
• Ctrl + p = Print
• Alt + Shift + p = Publish
• Alt + Shift + f = Fullscreen distraction free writing

Added Bonus

Text Alignment Shortcuts

• Align Left =Alt+Shift+L
• Align Centre =Alt+Shift+C
• Align Right =Alt+Shift+R
• Justify Text =Alt+Shift+J

Link Modification Shortcuts

• Insert Link =Alt+Shift+A
• Remove Link =Alt+Shift+S

Five Awesome Shortcuts You Probably Didn’t Know

• Insert Blockquote =Alt+Shift+Q
• Add/Remove Code Tag =Alt+Shift+X
• Insert Image =Alt+Shift+M
• Insert Page Break Tag =Alt+Shift+P
• Insert More Tag =Alt+Shift+T

Less Used Shortcuts for the Visual Editor

• Enter Distraction-free writing mode =Alt+Shift+W
• Open Spell Checker =Alt+Shift+N
• Save Draft =Ctrl+S
• Show/hide the Kitchen Sink =Shift+Alt+Z
• Help =Alt+Shift+H

Heading Shortcuts

These shortcuts are for the various headings from H1 to H6. You need not select the sentence. Simply place your cursor on the sentence to be highlighted and apply the keyboard shortcut (and just a reminder that if you’re using a Mac, you’ll use Option+Command instead of Ctrl).

• Heading 1 =Ctrl+1
• Heading 2 =Ctrl+2
• Heading 3 =Ctrl+3
• Heading 4 =Ctrl+4
• Heading 5 =Ctrl+5
• Heading 6 =Ctrl+6

Comment Moderation Shortcuts

For those of you who see a lot of comments daily, filtering them could be a tedious task. WordPress understands your concerns. That’s why they have an entire dedicated array of shortcuts for comment moderation. With these shortcuts you can fly through hundreds of comments in no time.

Enable Shortcuts for Comment Moderation

Before we begin with comment moderation shortcuts, we need to enable the “Keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation” option in our WordPress account. By default this option is disabled for everyone, and needs to be activated for each individual user.

• Go to WP Dashboard > Users > Your Profile
• Check the box Enable keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation
• Click on Update Profile

Comment Navigation Shortcuts

The first thing you want to do is navigate through the list of comments.
The currently active or selected comment is highlighted in blue.

• Navigate to Comment Above K (also called the Comment Up key)
• Navigate to Comment Below J (also called the Comment Down key)

It is interesting to note that you don’t need to use any key combination in order to navigate through the comment list. You can also navigate across comment pages with the J and K navigation keys. This means that if you’re on the last comment of the current page and there is another page after this, pressing K, i.e. the Comment Down key will load the next page.

Comment Moderation Action Shortcuts

Once you’ve selected the comment you want to moderate (i.e. it’s highlighted in blue), you can use any of the following comment action shortcuts:

• Approve comment – A
• Mark comment as spam – S
• Delete comment – D
• Restore comment – Z
• Unapprove comment, and put it back into moderation – U
• Reply to the comment – R (Hit Esc to cancel the reply)
• Activate Quick Edit for inline editing of the comment – Q

Bulk Comment Moderation Shortcuts

If you have a lot of comments you want to quickly attend to, the bulk moderation shortcuts is your saviour.

• First off you need to select the comments. Navigate using the J and K keys, and press X to select the comments you want to moderate.
• You can also bulk select all the comments using Shift+X. Then you can deselect comments using the X key

The following shortcuts are for bulk moderating the selected comments

• Approve comments – Shift+A
• Mark comments as spam – Shift+S
• Delete comments – Shift+D
• Unapprove comments – Shift+U
• Move comments to Trash – Shift+T
• Restores comments from Trash – Shift+Z

Productive people live by the rule that “We must use time as a tool, not as a couch”. In sickness or in health, they do not waste a single second of their lives. One of these productivity tips include the rampant usage of the awesome shortcuts WordPress has to offer.since WordPress has a rich array of keyboard shortcuts that help you increase your productivity rate by leaps and bounds!

It might take you a while to get used to using keyboard shortcuts instead of mouse or touchpad. However in the long run, it will definitely speed up the process and help you save time.