WordPress basics is like a starter pack to get a feel of WordPress and knowing the system quickly. WordPress is becoming popular day by day and has become the most preferred blogging platform for bloggers. If we talk about figures, WordPress accounts for about 25% of websites and more that 50% of websites use WordPress for content management system (CMS). The simplicity of WordPress makes it so popular and you can actually use it without any knowledge of coding.
WordPress was initially launched in the year 2003 purely as a blogging platform but in recent times is now being used for full fledged websites. Since the vast number of users have no knowledge of coding, sometimes they struggle to understand the system. We thought it would be good to write this article to make WordPress users’s life easy. Please note this article is only for those who have successfully installed WordPress and want to explore more.
These are ten WordPress basics that you should know.
1. Admin Login: When installing WordPress, some users find it difficult to navigate from where you access the admin page. Unless you use some plugin which makes you login from front page, you need to access your WordPress site from yoursite/wp-admin. The wp-admin is the directory where your login file is and you need to point to that directory.
2. Plugins and Widgets: WordPress comes with basic feature which you need for blogging. If you want more features, then you will need to install plugins. What are plugins? it is a piece of program, which can be installed in WordPress to extend your website’s capabilities. Who creates plugins? There are companies and freelance programmers which create plugins. Some plugins are free to use and some are not free. You need to search the right one for your site. There are more than 50,000 plugins available for WordPress.
WordPress widgets is the functionality which helps you manage the sidebars, footer etc of your site. The default widget that you will find is search, calendar, tag cloud etc. Plugins and themes also have their own widgets.
3. Difference between page and post: Pages are the static contents on your WordPress site. There are few contents you may like to keep as static like About us, Contact Us, Services etc. These are the contents which are usually general for most websites and help users to know about your website. The post in WordPress is the real content which is the reason your user visit your website. Posts are the articles you write according to the theme of your website.
4. Users: WordPress offers you multi user capabilities. You can have your whole team working and posting articles on your site at same time. The system offers you different options for different user capability you assign. WordPress offers five categories, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber.
Their powers are as follows:
- Administrator: Obviously Admin is the king with all the powers and can do all the task.
- Editor: This user is to manage your content on the website. The editor can create new posts, edit posts and even delete posts, including that of other users.
- Author: This person can create and manage their own post only.
- Contributor: As the name suggests, this person is just a contributor. The user can submit the post but cannot publish it. Only the Administrator or Editor can publish this user’s post.
- Subscriber: This is user is for those using WordPress as community or e-commerce site. This user can only manage their profile.
However, if you are not happy with how WordPress has defined the roles, you install this plugin and to assign powers as you like.
5. Media: Uploading pictures or video is very easy in WordPress. The process is just drag and drop. You can even add a picture while you write your post. You would notice that when you upload a picture on WordPress, it creates a number of sizes of the same picture. This feature is in WordPress so that you don’t have to waste time in re-sizing your images for your post or thumbnails.
6. Permalink or Custom URL: This is a very important feature of WordPress system which is ignored by many users. Permalink gives you option as to how your URL of the post and pages should look like. Custom URL structures can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward compatibility of your links. Using this feature you can change your URL structure. To access this you need to go Dashboard > Setting > Permalink and choose your option and click save.
7. Categories, Tags and Menu: When you have a number of posts on your website and you want to define a category for them, then this feature will segregate the content of your website making it easy for the user to navigate. A lot of people get confused between categories and tags; categories are the broader section of the website and tags bring them close. Two categories may have common tag. For example, there are two categories-technology and science and these two categories may have a common tag such as future, interesting, shocking etc.
Menu is a display of navigation directly taking user to the desired area of the website. WordPress offers menu from categories and tags both. Try making a menu here: Dashboard > Appearance > Menu. You can different menu according to your theme like main navigation, footer menu etc.
8. Appearance and Theme: One thing good about WordPress is that websites look really nice and clean. Themes is the functionality which gives appearance to your website. You can browse through thousand of themes from free to paid and install it according to your need. Once you install a theme, you can change the look of your website and you can see the changes live. Try it here, Dashboard > Appearance.
9. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Every website or blog is hungry for web traffic. Imagine you are performing at a concert with no audience,you would not like to perform for long. If you want to generate organic traffic you need optimise your site for search engine. This you can do by installing your preferred plugins like Yoast, All in One SEO Pack etc.
10. Security and Updates: If your are using the internet, you need to keep yourself safe and you install anti viruses to protect your personal computer. WordPress is a website so you need to install something in the server to keep it safe from intruders or hackers. There are number of plugins like Wordfence to protect your website. And keep your WordPress installation updated because updates include bug fixes as well. Updating WordPress is not rocket science and you can just update it by clicking a button at your dashboard.
I have tried to broadly cover the points that I think you should know. Please add comments if you would like to know more about WordPress and if you think something else should be included in this article.
Don’t forget the read our “starting your blog guide”