Understanding the Dashboard
An overview of every metric, chart and widget the Magento dashboard shows you right after login.
After logging in you land on the Dashboard automatically. Think of it as your control room: a quick overview of your store's health without having to jump into individual sections first. The dashboard is made up of several independent widgets, some of which you can show/hide and reorder via drag and drop.
Order chart
In the top left, a line chart shows revenue and order count over a selectable time range. Use the tabs Last 24 Hours, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, Current Year and Custom Period to switch the time frame. "Custom Period" opens two date fields for a freely chosen from/to range. Click Go to actually refresh the chart – without that click, the selection has no effect, which trips up a lot of newcomers.
Bestsellers, most viewed and recently added customers
Next to the chart sit three stacked tabs:
- Bestsellers: the top-selling products by quantity in the chosen period.
- Most Viewed Products: which product pages got the most views – high traffic combined with low sales is often a sign of a pricing or description problem.
- New Customers: the most recently registered accounts, with email address and sign-up date.
Stock widgets
Below the charts, Magento lists two separate tables: products whose stock has fallen below the configured reorder threshold ("Low Stock"), and products with zero stock. Both lists link straight to the respective product form, so you can trigger reorders without going through the full product grid first.
Customers widget
At the very bottom, Magento shows the customers with the most orders and the ones with the highest total spend (lifetime value) – a quick way to identify your most valuable repeat customers without pulling up a dedicated report.
Store view selector
In the very top right of the dashboard sits a dropdown for the store view every number is calculated for. If you run multiple languages or storefronts, deliberately switch between "All Store Views" (combined total) and individual store views here so you don't accidentally misread one market's numbers as another's.
Practical tip: the dashboard caches some of its data. If numbers look stale right after a fresh order, a simple page reload usually fixes it; for persistent discrepancies, check the indexers under System > Index Management (see the "Understanding Indexers" chapter).
Refreshing statistics
The "Bestsellers", "Most Viewed Products" and "New Customers" widgets don't pull from live data – they read from precomputed report tables. If Magento shows a notice above a widget saying the data isn't current, go to Reports > Statistics > Refresh Statistics: select the affected reports (e.g. Products Ordered, New Accounts) in the grid and choose Refresh Lifetime Statistics from the action dropdown. Normally the cron job refreshes this hourly on its own; if cron isn't running reliably, the dashboard numbers stay visibly stale.
Enabling and disabling the chart
The dashboard's line chart can be turned off globally. Under Stores > Configuration > Advanced > Admin > Dashboard, the Enable Charts field (Yes/No) controls whether a chart is rendered at all. On servers with a strict Content Security Policy or without access to the Google Charts library, disabling it can help avoid an empty area or an error message.
Collapsing and expanding widgets
Every dashboard widget has a small arrow in its top-right corner that lets you collapse or expand the panel's content without leaving the page. That's useful if you only care about one particular metric and want to keep the rest of the page more compact – the choice only applies to the current session and isn't saved permanently.