When mentioning the CMS platform, or Content Management System, the ultimate answer you usually get from small-scale to big businesses is starting with WordPress. This free website-building tool offers users thousands of website templates, allowing the company to customize its webpage with a few drags and drops.
WordPress is designed for all skill levels. Knowing how to work WordPress will help you reach out to advanced technical factors needed in a website without understanding code, PHP, or MySQL platforms. In this article, we will guide you through a step-by-step tutorial on how to use WordPress.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is a free, online, and open-source that is one of the best website builders for small businesses that use PHP and MySQL programming languages. This website builder is the most well-known content management system, or in more technical terms, CMS.
This system allows for the creation of several administrative users for different purposes. CMS like WordPress contains text and formatting tools and uploads video, images, music, maps, and code. Without computer programming experience, you can still create a WordPress site to create and edit branding content.
Read more: How to make a sitemap?
8 Advantages Of Using WordPress
There are reasons why starting with WordPress is the ultimate option for beginners when creating their business website. Besides it being a free platform, here are eight advantages of using WordPress:
- Suitable for all businesses: Any business can work with WordPress, from eCommerce stores to showcasing a portfolio or hosting a social network, group, or podcast. Based on business needs, WordPress offers different packages, including free and paid plugins that are best suitable for your site.
- User-friendly structure: All users need to set up WordPress site are a domain name and a web hosting account. WordPress has a user-friendly and simple-to-manage admin panel that includes all the options required to customize a site’s header and style.
- Thousands of templates: Because of its prominent and constantly updated sources of free and commercial themes, WordPress themes give users a wide range of options for customizing the look and functionality of a new website.
- Plugins extend functionality: When starting with WordPress, users may add features like shopping carts, galleries, contact forms, and more to any WordPress-compatible website using one of the hundreds of plugins available on its site directory.
- Possible to have a higher rank: Regarding SEO, searchability is critical for search engines like Google to give your website a high ranking. Fortunately, WordPress sites rank highly for their keywords because they always provide up-to-date tools and plugins to optimize the site best.
- Mobile-responsive website: It is a plus point for a website to have mobile responsiveness because Google will consider this to rank your page highly. WordPress provides several responsive theme styles, which users may make a static site responsive using plugins and changes to the theme files.
- Have a built-in blog: For clients who want to add a blog to their website, this content management system provides a “built-in” blog feature accessible to any device at any time.
- Have a support service: Because WordPress is widely used globally, people who love and master in how to work WordPress have established WordPress communities. These groups responsible for updating, securing, and modify to the source code for WordPress. Or you can ask for support from Website Management Services to utilize their expertise in creating a professional website.
7 Steps To Build A WordPress Website
Many industry experts have stated that one of the essential skills you should develop as a small company owner nowadays is knowing how to make a website from scratch.
Learning how to work with WordPress and create an attractive landing page for your business or project is valuable and beneficial. Fortunately, there are only seven steps to set up a WordPress site, and all are quick and simple, including:
- Installing WordPress
- Navigating in WordPress Dashboard
- Creating Content
- Installing WordPress Plugins
- Choosing WordPress Themes
- Enhancing WordPress Performance
- Securing WordPress
Installing WordPress
To make the CMS more adaptable for all web servers to download and install, when starting with WordPress, the system has to be:
- PHP version 5.2.4 or greater.
- MySQL version 5.0.15 or greater or any version of MariaDB.
These systems are mostly available on all devices. Therefore, finding a hosting provider to which WordPress needs access takes time and effort. Moreover, to simplify the WordPress installation process, several hosting uses various auto-installers, which help users to avoid file uploading or database creation.
You can either choose a web hosting and have their support in installing WordPress or create WordPress using these steps:
- Download the latest WordPress version from the WordPress.org site.
- Uploading WordPress files to your hosting account (Use File Manager or FTP client).
- Visit your domain name and fill in the MySQL database, administrator details, and site information.
Navigating in WordPress Dashboard
When completing the installation, it is time to navigate WordPress using the administrator dashboard.
You will see a link to the login page at the front end of a WordPress blog. However, some might not be in the right position because of the system. The simplest way to get into WordPress is to add “wp-admin” to the end of your website domain like this:
This URL can also give you access to the login screen, where you must enter the administrator’s username and password. Keep in mind that you submitted this MySQL database while installing WordPress. If you cannot remember your password, click “Forgot your password?” to recover your account.
To set up WordPress site, users need to know about all the features on the WordPress dashboard. Some basic modules are:
- Toolbar: gives you quick access to the most common parts and resources.
- Navigation menu: links to all WordPress administration panels. A submenu with more options will appear when you hover over menu items.
- The main working space.
- At a Glance: report the number of pages, posts, and comments you have — the WordPress theme and version you use.
- Activity: tell you details on your most recent posts and comments.
- Quick Draft: A new blog entry will be created by entering text into this box. However, you cannot publish your article here.
- WordPress News: Showcases the latest WordPress news.
Creating Content
Publishing a new post or page is the first step in the process of how to work with WordPress. This content management system lets users archive, categorize, and tag a post to set up WordPress site. You can start posting new posts on WordPress using the following:
- “Add New section” under Posts or select New -> Post.
- Enter words or publish content.
- There is a “meta-boxes” on the right side of the screen, which have unique purposes:
- Publish: schedule the post and modify its visibility and status. Click the Publish button when finished. Use the Move to Trash button to remove the post if you change your mind.
- Categories: Change, add, or remove the category on your post.
- Tags: add new tags.
- Featured Image: Add a featured image to a post, placing it on top of the post
Pages, on the other hand, are mainly used for non-dated, static content. It usually involves content like Contact us or About pages. You can create a new page on WordPress using the following:
- “Add New section” under Pages or select New -> Page
- Add “New page” section with an identical WYSIWYG text editor.
- Page Attributes: customize page orders and decide on parent pages.
Installing WordPress Plugins
When starting with WordPress, it is necessary to utilize its plugins, which are used to expand the platform’s functionality. Without writing any code, you may add new features to a WordPress site by installing and activating a plugin.
Many plugins, both free and paid, have been created for a variety of uses, from security to social network sharing. Thus, users can easily find a plugin suitable to their requirements.
Even beginners can work with WordPress plugins in the simplest way. For your information, this content management system offers both free and premium plugins package. You can either consider hiring website development services or follow these steps to set up WordPress site plugins:
- Free Version:
- Click “Add New” under Plugins.
- Enter the plugin desired name to install.
- Click “Install” and then “Activate” the plugin.
- Paid Version:
- Click “Add New” under Plugins.
- Hit “Upload Plugin” and select a plugin archive.
- Click “Install” and then “Activate” the plugin.
Choosing WordPress Themes
By starting with WordPress, you will have a chance to access thousands of website themes available in both free and paid versions. Whether you need a landing page for e-commerce, podcast, or portfolio, you can work with WordPress using its collection. Fortunately, installing free WordPress themes is a simple process that only takes a few minutes.
Moreover, the theme preview function lets you quickly see how your website will turn out when applying a specific theme. This supports saving time to set up WordPress site since there is no need to download many themes and test each differently.
For the free version, you only need to click on the “Appearance” section and scroll through thousands of free themes available.
However, it is a little more complex for the paid version, which includes the following:
- Click on the “Appearance” section
- Press the “Upload Theme” button and choose the .zip file.
- Click “Activate” to apply the theme.
With professional experience in web designing, ROI Digitally will help locate your brand identity to distinguish the brand in consumers’ minds. Our creative team provides modern and personalized templates that amplify the core elements of Visulise DNA. Check out ROI’s portfolio here: https://roidigitally.com/portfolio/visulise/
Enhancing WordPress Performance
In the previous steps on how to work WordPress, we successfully installed and created a website with designs, content, and other factors. However, as the website expands, more elements need to be input that may affect the site’s loading time, negatively impacting your page ranking. Therefore, to avoid slow running and have search engines like Google rate your site, optimization is the ultimate solution.
It is not enjoyable when a user accesses a page that keeps loading forever. Hence, your CMS should optimize your page load more swiftly and effectively, which helps your visitors be satisfied and eager to return.
Without any technical expertise, you can make your WordPress site load faster. These are several methods to speed up your website significantly:
- Using WordPress caching plugins.
- Optimizing WordPress images.
- Enabling WordPress using gzip compression.
- Postponing parsing of JavaScript in WordPress.
- Operating a Content Delivery Network.
Read more: Website Maintenance Cost
Securing WordPress
Last but not least, to set up WordPress site, you must secure your WordPress site to save your effort. WordPress is the most widely used CMS in the world, yet it gets hacked the most. Here are some tips to protect your page from hacking and unknown access:
- Update WordPress regularly: “Dashboard” -> “Updates”
- Unique Username and Hard Passwords.
- Back up WordPress.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do I Speed Up WordPress Website?
When starting with WordPress, a slow page load is sometimes unavoidable. However, you can speed up the loading of your WordPress site without any technical knowledge. Here are some techniques to dramatically speed up your website:
- Using plugins for WordPress caching.
- Compressing images for WordPress.
- Enabling .gzip compression for WordPress.
- Postponing WordPress’s JavaScript parsing.
- Establishing a content delivery network.
How To Add A Menu Within WordPress?
It is simple to add a menu within this CMS as long as you define the menu before inserting any content: Here are 6 ways to add a menu:
- Define a Menu.
- Sign in to WordPress Dashboard.
- Select the Menus option to bring up the Menu Editor from the “Appearance” menu on the left-hand side of the Dashboard.
- Choose “Create a new menu” at the top of the page.
- Enter your desired menu name in the Menu Name box.
- Click “Create Menu.”
Where To Find Help When Already Using WordPress?
To access all of our help resources when signed into WordPress.com, click on the blue and white “?” button in the lower right corner. Click the Contact Us button after that. To start the chat, enter your query in the box next to “How can we help?” and click “Chat with us.”
How to use WordPress for beginners? With this step-by-step tutorial, your business should work with WordPress to create a professional and attractive website. In short, WordPress is a free content management system that uses PHP or MySQL programming language to help your business site with code, design, and optimization for search engines without requiring any technical experience.
Co-Founder & General Manager @ ROI Digitally
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