Learn WordPress For Complete Beginners - The World's Most Popular CMS

1. Introduction: Let's create a beautiful, effective, high converting website with WordPress. What's up, everybody? My name is David. I hope you're having a great day. Welcome to my comprehensive Skillshare course on WordPress. Now, I've been building with WordPress for well over ten years. I love Wordpress because it simply allows people who are non coders to build very effective websites. That means you don't need to know how to code. You don't need to know PHP or CSS or databases or anything to Techie. This comprehensive course, I'm going to be covering everything that you need to know to get started. First, I'm going to be covering what WordPress is, how to use it, and why it's so popular. Next, I'm going to show you how to install WordPress locally on your machine. So if you're not ready to buy shared hosting or a domain name, you can totally follow along with this course with just a modern laptop and an Internet next, I'll be showing you how to actually install WordPress with a shared host, how to get a domain name, how to set up name servers, and all the little technical details on the back end that you need to know to get started installing WordPress effectively and correctly. In addition to that, I'm going to be giving you my recommendations for my favorite shared web host and my favorite domain name register and why. And it just explain how all these different pieces work together to create your websites. The WordPress dashboard. So once you finally install WordPress, you're going to have access to the admin area, and you have access to a bunch of different settings. I'm going to share with you how every single setting works and how to use it. Next up our WordPress themes. I'm going to cover what WordPress themes exactly are, where to get them, how to install them, the differences between various paid themes and free themes, different marketplaces to get themes, as well as the different tools you can use on the back end to build your website with different themes, including Elementor and the Gutenberg Block Builder. Next, our Wordpress plug in. So I'm going to share with you again what plug ins are, where to get them, how to install them, different marketplaces, to find great paid plugins, as well as how to get free plugins for your websites. Then we're going to be jumping into blogPost and pages. So I'm going to walk you step by step on how to properly blog with Wordpress, how to structure blogpost, the differences between categories and tags, how to add in creative elements using different blocks and patterns. As well as I'll be covering what pages are, how to use them, and what essential pages you absolutely need for your websites. So if you've been looking to get started learning Wordpress and you want to go from complete beginner to pro, this course is for you. So, if you're ready to get started, let's begin. 2. What is WordPress?: What is Wordpress. So before we begin with anything else, we really need to cover what exactly WordPress is. So in short, it's software that powers the back end of your website. Technically speaking, it's called a content management system, and it's one of the most popular content management systems in the world. It's free and open source and empowers millions of websites. So with a website, you do need three parts so opens up right here. You need a web host, you need a domain name, and you need a content management system. So a webhst is a private company that operates a server, and that server is a powerful computer that's on 247. Website is going to be made up of a bunch of databases, PHP files, CSS files, et cetera. Where are all those files going to live? They're going to live at your web host. When people try to access your website, what they're really doing is sending a request to the server found at your web host to deliver all that information to their computer. You also need a domain name for your website. So domain name is just a URL of your website. So for example, my website is websqpro.com, but you can.com.net.co.org, whatever you want. Now, if we take a look at the back end of a Wordpress powered website, I'm over here under appearance in the theme file editor, here's a bunch of PHP files. So back before content management systems were a thing, you actually had to know how to code all this and upload all these different files to your web hosting account and then make your website work in that way. And Wordpress really got started in 2003. And the reason why it became so popular is because it allowed people who didn't know how to code or didn't know how to write like CSS and PHP and HTML and all this put all this stuff together to actually publish a website. Makes Wordpress so popular and powerful are really the themes that can power your website. So themes are just like templates that can be customized with a block Builder. So again, no coding. You can build a beautiful high converting website very easily, and you have thousands and thousands of themes to choose from. There's free themes, and there's also premium themes, or premium themes you can buy from a private company and then upload it to your accounts. Addition to that, Wordpress also comes with tens of thousands of plugins that you can use. And plugins are just little pieces of software that add on additional functionality to your website. So for example, we have the Elementor website Builder there. We have WooCommerce, which adds in E Commerce functionality to your Wordpress website. We have WP forms over there, which allows you to add in like a contact form and payment forms. And we also have the site kit by Google, so you can add in Google Analytics and Search Console AdSens very easily. So all in all, that's what WordPress is, and that's why it's so popular. It's a free open source content management system that comes with a bunch of different themes and plugins, a block Builder to allow you to build and create beautiful high converting websites all without knowing how to code. 3. Wordpress.org vs Wordpress.com: Wordpress.com versus wordpress.org. Great branding, by the team behind Wordpress, calling these two things the same exact thing, even though they're quite different. So what wordpress.com is is a hosted version of WordPress. So they're combining the content management system and web hoosting into a done for you offer. That's why they say hassle free Wordpress. You just sign up. You get Wordpress already installed. You can start building your website and so forth. What wordpress.org is is a landing page explaining the software of Wordpress that you can install on your own shared hosting account. The only reason why you would ever visit wordpress.org is because this is where you can actually download Wordpress if you want to have a local installation on your machine for whatever reason. But because Wordpress is so popular, all web hosts include a one click Install of WordPress. So here's my account with Blue Host. So if I click over here to add a site, I have Install Wordpress right there. So you can just install WordPress at the click of a button. Let's break down wordpress.com in a little bit more detail. So let's check out the plans and pricing just so you completely understand what's going on. Now, Wordpress does have a completely free plan, and the free plan allows you to have a website that is a subdomain of Wordpress. So it'll be like my website.wordpress.com. Now, if you want your own custom domain name, you're going to have to upgrade to the personal accounts, which costs $4 a month, and it's pretty limited. So you get 6 gigabytes of storage, you get a few premium themes, pretty much it. Now, if you want the ability to have all premium themes, then you have to upload to the premium. And then finally, the business is full wordpress. You get themes and plugins and $25 a month for one website. So you get good hosting. You can build a high traffic website with this, so you got unlimited pages, posts, users, and visitors, like, unlimited visitors. There's no limitation on how many people can visit your website. So you can build like 100,000 visitor a month website on the business plan with WordPress. But again, it's just one website. Whereas with WordPress in a shared hosting account like Bluehost, if we take a look at the pricing right there. We've got 295 a month, and I can install WordPress ten times on ten different websites. So what do you want to pay? Do you want to pay like 295 a month, or do you want to pay $25 a month. So, again, this is like unlimited visitors and whatnot. So it's quite powerful hosting. But if you're just getting started, that's why everyone recommends always going with, like, a shared host. That's why I'm going to be using Bluehost in this tutorial. But that's really the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. Wordpress.com is a hosted version of Wordpress that's kind of already done for you. It's good for one website. So again, like, with the upgrading to the personal plan because you want a custom waname that's only for one website. Okay. So otherwise, you can use the free plan, have like my website.wordpress.com. If you want a custom maname, personal plan, upgrade for one website. And so forth whereas the.org, Landing page, explain what WordPress is. Then you can have a one quick install on the back end of a shared hosting account. You can install WordPress as many times as you want on as many websites as you want. So with this plan over here, you get ten websites. I can install Wordpress ten times, and it's full Wordpress. It's the same as the business plan over here where I get all themes and all plugins. There's no limitations or anything like that. Put on me when you go with Wordpress and a shared Host. Anyways, that's what the difference is between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. 4. Recommended tools: Wire tools and explaining why you need them for this course. All right, so tool number one is to register a domain name at a domain name regisar. Now, with a shared host, you're going to see a lot of them offer a free domain name, but the catch is that it's free for the first year, and after the first year, you have to pay an expensive renewal rates, much more expensive than you'd be paying at a domain name register like name cheep. So that's why I use and recommend Namecheap because they provide low rates, and you can lock in a domain name for up to ten years in advance at a very cost effective price. If I navigate down right there, let's click on domain names. New customers get a nice coupon code if you're a brand new customer to Namecheap, so that's why I use and recommend Namecheap. Now, you also need to purchase a shared hosting account, and you want a shared hosting account because you don't have a website. You don't have traffic, so we don't need anything complicated. You don't need a server, you don't need a VPS. You don't need to be paying 20, $30 a month for web hoosting. You need a nice budget friendly shared hosting account to launch your websites. Now, the two shared hosts that I really like are Blue Host and hosting are both provide great hosting at a very cost effective price. Also make it very easy to set up your WordPress website at the click of a button as well and provide good supports. So those are the two services that you're going to need a domain name, add a domain name register, and a shared hosting accounts. 5. Install WordPress locally: Sewing wordpress locally on your computer, let's get started. So first off, why would anyone want to do this? In my opinion, there's two primary reasons. The first one is development and testing. So, with a shared hosting account, you don't get access to staging, typically. So a staging site would be like staging your website.com. The purpose of a staging site is so you can tweak your website, play around with the code, make changes, maybe break things, and it's okay because it's not on the live site. So this local WP feature is very nice because it allows you for development and testing. You can build or tweak WordPress sites, themes, plugins and add custom code. And if anything breaks, it's fine because it's a safe sandbox to experiment in. And the other reason would be simply learning. You're completely brand new to Wordpress, and it provides a local setup for you to play around in, break things and figure out how Wordpress works without you having to purchase a domain name or a hosting plan. Okay, so with that out of the way, let's get started. Click over here to download Local WP. Choose the platform you're on and then enter your last name and then choose your organization type and then work email. Okay. So once you enter in your information, local WP should start downloading automatically. Next, go ahead and follow the onscreen instructions to install Local WP on your computer. Fantastic. So you should be looking at a welcome screen right now. Go ahead and create a free account. Once you click on that, you're going to be prompted to create an account over here at hub.localbp.com slash CET so you want to go ahead and do that. But you can also navigate back over here and click on No Thanks. It's okay to report errors. We'll just click on No Thanks, Okay to Enable usage reporting. No, thanks. And that's it. Simple as that. So if you want to create an account, you can, you don't have to. You can just begin using local WP rights now. So click on creates a new site. Okay, so now we can create a new site or create from a blueprint. So you're like a blueprint, start a new site with pre installed elements like plugins and themes, blah, blah, blah. What's that? What's X out of that. So your blueprints are rights over here on the left hand side, but you need to already have a site first, then you can save it as a blueprint. And then whenever you create a new website, it kind of copies, like the pre designed elements that you already created with a previous site. That makes any sense. So you can save it as a blueprint. Short, we don't have any blueprints. So don't don't need to worry about that. Anyways, just click down over here to add a local site, and we're going to click on create a new site right there. Click on Continue. Then name your site. So I'm going to call this Test Site. Then click on and then click on Advanced Options right there. Then you have your local domain and your local path. So this is fine. Just going to keep this as is. If you want to change the local site domain, you can change it down there if you want. Not a big deal. Just keep it as is. Click on Continue. Then I'm going to leave it as preferred. Then we have to add in a WordPress username and a Wordpress password and a Wordpress email. So go ahead and do that. Then if we click on Advanced Options, we can change the language if we want. And is this a Wordpress Multisite we'll keep it as no. Fantastic. Our WordPress website has successfully been installed. So you can click over here to open the site. Now it's going to open up the test site dot local. And there we go. So it looks good, has a theme already set up. So let's navigate over here. Back over here and click on WP Admin, login to the back end of our website. Now you need to enter in the username and the password that you just created. Then go ahead and click on the login button, and there you go. So we have the latest version of WordPress, and that's how you stall Wordpress locally on your computer. 6. Import site from a local installation: Migrating your website from local WP to a live shared hosting account. How do you do that? So this section of the course is only for people who decided to design their website with local WP. Then you purchase shared hosting later, and you're like, Well, how do I move my site from local WP to my actual hosting account? That's what I want to show you in this section of the course. All right, so the first thing that we need to do is we need to install the same plugin on both environments over here with our local site and over here with this temporary domain name that I have at my Blue Host account. So let's navigate over here, and we're going to click on Plugins, and we're going to click on Add PlugN and the plugin that we want to add in is WP Vivid. Literally WP vivid. Search for that. And then right here, we have WP Vivid migration backup staging. Go ahead and click on Install. And now you want to do the same exact thing with your shared hosting count. So go over here to appearance or sorry, go over here to Plugins, and then go to add Plugin. And let's type in WP Vivid. Search for that and go ahead and install that and click on Activate and then make sure to click on Activate as well. Okay, so this is the local site. We have the WP Vivid plug in activated, and we also have it activated over here. Now, the first thing that we need to do is we need to link the two sites together. And so you can do that by setting up a key. So this is very important right here. That's what you do. Click on key right over here. The key will expire in 8 hours. We're going to do this right now, so just change that to 2 hours and then generate the key. So again, I'm on Blue Host right over here. So I'm generating the key. Click over here to copy it. Boom, got that. Now we need to navigate back to the local site. Now, do we need key? No. We go to Auto migration because we're uploading this site to the shared hosting account so you might go to Automgration. So click on that, and then you just copy and paste that key that you had right there. Boom. And then you can choose to upload everything, repress files only, only database. You typically want to upload everything, so just leave it as default, which is database plus files. So go ahead and click on Save for the key. There we go. And now these two are linked together. So when you're ready to move, just click on Clone then transfer. In this entire process will take a few minutes to complete. Fantastic. One backup task finish. So what we've successfully done is we've sent all the data of our local WP sites over to our shared hosting accounts, okay? So I sent this site over and all the data and everything that it needs over to Blue Host. Now, let's navigate over here to our Blue Host WordPress installation. And let's take a look at the site, and hasn't been moved over. So there's a second step that we need to do. So now you're logged into your shared hosting account. All you need to do is click a button to restore the files that you just sent over. So to do that, you want to be under the backup and restore tab, scroll down. Then right down here, you just see backups, and it says, received backup. Just click on this Restore button right there, and as simple as that. So let me go ahead and do that. Now it says, please do not close the page or switch other pages when a restore task is running as it could trigger some unexpected errors that is quite important. So when you click on this Restore button, just let WP Vivid do its thing. So anyways, when you're ready, click on Restore. Okay, so that took about a minute and says Restore, complete it successfully. All right, so just log me out because I had a different user name and password, so just go ahead and log into your site again. So the username and password to log into the site is the same username and password that you're using with local WP, if that makes any sense. So that's why you're logged out and things changed. So just use the password that you're using for local WP. Anyways, it's as simple as that. And so over here we have the test site that I just uploaded. Looks great. So I'm over here on my Blue Host account, and I've successfully migrated the site over here from WP local. And it's as simple as that. Anyways, that's how you migrate a test site from local WP to your shared hosting accounts. 7. Get a Domain Name: Welcome to my laptop. Let's begin. So step one with creating a website with the 2025 theme from Wordpress is to get a domain name. Now, you can't get your domain name at a web host, but I definitely suggest using a dedicated domain name register. I personally use Namecheap simply because you get the best prices long term. Now, to get Sart is very simple. All you have to do is type in the domain name that you want to register right here in the search part and then click on Search. Okay, so let's go ahead and do exactly that. You'll then be taken to a screen that will show you whether or not your domain name is available to register. Now, I definitely suggest getting a.com if this is your first website. So if it's available, go ahead and Add to Cart and make a purchase. If it's not, then you need to play around with different words and phrases to find a.com that is available to register. Anyways, when you're ready to continue, click on the Add to Cart button. You'll then be presented with a bunch of upsells. We can ignore all of this. Go ahead and click on the Red Checkout button. Fantastic. So now we're on our shopping carts page. Now this is why I like a domain name regisar because you get a very low registration price, low renewal rates, free HuasPtection. And best of all, you can lock in this low price for up to ten years in advance, whereas with a web post, you can only do year to year. Anyway, select a certain amount of time that you want to register your domain name for, and then click on Confirm Order. Once you click on Confirm Order, you'll need to log into your name cheap account. If you don't have a name cheap account, then you'll need to create account. So go ahead and do exactly that create account. Okay, then you should be on the order review page. So make sure everything's okay. Look at your domain name registration, the amount of time you're registering the domain name four, the free is protection. When you're ready to continue, simply click on the pay now button and submit 8. Get a Shared Hosting Account: Next up, it's time to get a web host for our website. So in this tutorial video, I'm going to be using Blue Host. Now, Blue Host is a recommended web host from the team behind WordPress. They've been recommended by the team behind WordPress for well over a decade. Now, to get a start with Blue Host. Again, very simple. All you have to do is click on the big yellow Get Started button. What we're going to be doing is buying a shared web hosting account the shared hosting account, it's very cheap. It's just a piece of a server because that's what a web hoost is. They manage and maintain servers to help keep your website alive and active and available 247. Now, you don't need Wordpress uptop here. That's if you already have an established website and you want to more of a manage experience. We want to keep things simple. We're going to be using a shared hosting account. So go ahead and click on the yellow get Started button. Now, it should take you to this page over here. Build your own website. J got easier, scroll down a little bit. And now we have basic Choice plus and online store. Now, it does say Choice plus is recommended, and I have recommended the Choice plus plan in the past. Because the basic plan now allows for ten websites, and it's 40 K visitors a month, the basic plan is more than enough for our needs. So go ahead and click on Choose plan for the basic. Then it's going to ask you whether or not you want to register a domain name. So choose your free domain name. Now, the Asterisk is there for a reason. It's not really free. It's free for the first year. They waived the domain name registration fee. Then each year after that, you have to pay the renewal rates. And at Blue Host, it's over $20 for.com. As your domain name at Namecheap was much more cost effective than that. That's why I like using Namecheap. You could also register it for up to ten years in advance. Whereas a web hoost like Bluehost, you can only do it year to year, so you're always subject to the whims of Blue Host and any web host changing their domain name renewal rate. So, we already got a domain name at Namecheap, so we want to click on this one. I want to use a domain name I already own and go ahead and type in the domain name that you registered at Namecheap, and then click on use this domain. You need to do this because every shared hosting account needs a primary domain name on the account. When you're ready, click on Use this domain. Fantastic. So we have Wordpress basic Costing, and we also have this professional email trial, so it's free, but then it's one month free. Then we don't want this. So just X out of that. And now we have the rest of these options over here where we don't want to add anything in. Now, over here, you can register for up to one year or one year, up to three years in advance. This is your call. So it's up to you. With BuHost you can always upgrade your account later if you build a high traffic website and you need more resources. I think one year's okay, but again, this is your call. Anyways, when you're ready to buy, click on Continue to checkout. And it's as simple as that, so I'm not going to insult your intelligence and walk you through how to pay for something online. Just enter your payment information. Then click on Submit payments. And once you submit payment, Bluehost will go ahead and set up your account and automatically install WordPress on the primary domain name on the account. So when you're setting up the account, you entered in that domain name that you registered at Namecheap, well, now has WordPress installed. That's all you have to do. So you can click on this button to log into Wordpress, and it's as simple as that. Okay, so once you click on the Log into WordPress button, you're going to be presented with this screen right here. We can use the AI site creator and port a WordPress website, or I'm following a tutorial. You're following a tutorial, so go ahead and click on this button right here. Now you should be looking at your WordPress dashboard where you can create blog posts, pages, change the appearance of your website, and more. 9. Setup Nameservers: Setting up name servers for our website. So now we have our host stan account. Now we have a domain name at Namecheap. The next step to do is to map it. So you do that by setting up the correct name server. So when people visit your website.com, it's supposed to get the resources from your specific server. How does it know how to do that? We got to set up name servers on the back end. So if we click over here on websites, we're going to see that our site is currently using just a temporary domain name from Blue Host, which is totally fine. Now, we click over here for settings. And once we do that, we want to connect a domain name. So let's click on Connect Domain, and you want to enter the domain name that you entered in at Namecheap, right here. So let me go ahead and do that and click on Continue. Okay, so now we have a domain name, DNS status, and SSL status. So right now, we need to finish the set up. Okay, so now we have the setup over here, and now it's giving us the name servers. So very simple, we have NS one, Blue Host, NS two, Blue Host. So really technical guys, you got to copy and paste. Okay, so anyways, go back over to your name cheap accounts, and you want to click in and manage on the domain name. Click Manage when you're looking at your domain name over here. So this is Blog house, domain name I'm going to be using. So we navigate down here to name servers. We have custom DNS over there, so we want that. But right now it's just using general parking domain name or sorry, general parking DNS. So we just want to update it to this. So we may click over here. Copy. And we'll delete that, paste that in. Then click over here, click on Copy, and then go ahead and delete that and then click on Paste. And it's one, and it's two good. Click on this little tiny green check mark to save everything. And there we go. So DNS server update may take 48 hours to take effect. So it could take 48 hours, personally, I've ever seen it take that long. It's usually a few minutes, maybe half an hour. Max, what I would say, at this point in time, go get a cup of coffee. Anyways, just give it a little bit of time for it to prop a gate, and shortly, your website should be properly connected over here, and this should update to your domain name. So the next step, once you have your domain name at Nameche pointing to your shared hosting account at Blue Host, is just make sure that the DNS status says pointed. That means you did everything correctly. And now you want to click on the little dots over here, then click on set as SitURL. Then it should say make your website.com, your new Wordpress site URL. You want to click on Confirm. And now it should say pending Site URL, which is not a problem. So if we mouse over this, it says the site is currently using a temporary domain name. We're currently setting everything up. Once these set is complete, it will be automatically updated to vhw.com, which is exactly what we want. So we can begin editing and designing our website right now. 10. How to log Into Your Website: How to log into your Blue Host powered WordPress websites. Alright, so, first off, log in to your Blue Host account, navigate over here to websites. Now, as you can see, the propagation has finished, so it's coming up as HTPS, nice and secure lockout.com, so everything's working. So it does take maybe 30 minutes to 2 hours for propagation to really complete. Wait, it's to log into your site. Very simple. Just click on the website right there. Once you do that, you'll see this Edit WordPress site button right there. Just click on that, and it logs you in to Wordpress on the back end. So that's the first way you can access your website. Just log into your Bluehost account. Then click on the site you want to edit, then click on Edit WordPress websites and away you go. Here you are. You're inside your website so you can edit and design and get going on everything if you want. Now, the second way is to set your own password. Because when you went through the one quick Insall Wordpress over here, it auto set the password for you. So if you're like, Well, I want my own password. I don't want to use Blue Host Okay, no problem. This is how you do that. So you want to navigate over here, and you want to go down here to users, you want to click on all users. Now you have your user rate there, so we have the name and click on Edit. And now we want to set our own password, so we scroll down, and you want to see something that says account management, new password, and then set new password. So I'll just create a very simple password. We'll just say test one, two, three, actually, I'll just have it Auto generate that set new password. I'll take that. We'll copy that. There we go. Looks good. Navigate down here. Update profile. Fantastic. All right, so let me go ahead and logo at my site. And there we go. Okay, so how do you get to this page right here? So you want to go to your website. So mine is vhow.com, forwardlaAdMI. You do that, and it directs you to this screen right there. So you don't have to log in to Blue Host. You can just navigate to your site forwardlah WP Admin. I'll take you to this spot right here. How do you log in? You have to enter in a username or email address. What email address? The email address is the email address you used when you signed up to Blue Host. So that's the email address you put in right there, and the password is the one that you just created. There we go. So let's go ahead and click on the Login. And it's as simple as that. 11. Clearn Up Pre-Installed Content: Navigate over here to BlueHost. Bluehost has the same type of thing going on. So they have their dashboard over here, so telling you what to do next. Then they have different solutions hosting the marketplace. So this is just kind of promoting Blue Host services over here. What is helpful over here is a staging if you want to create a staging site. So that is quite helpful. That's the only usefulness of the Blue Host plug in, in my opinion, is this ability to create a staging site, so you don't need to use, local WP. You can create a staging site within Bluehost. So if you want to do that, you can, then I would keep the plug in. Otherwise, I don't see much of a use for it. Now, let's go over here to Plug ins and click on that. And then Blue Host comes with it no plug ins. Re installed. Luckily, they're not all activated. So a chisme is good for spam protection if you're going to have comments on your site, so it's up to you. If you're going to have comments, then I would use it. If you're not going to have comments, then you can go ahead and delete this. Personally, I don't really use blog comments anymore, so I personally would just go ahead and delete that. Again, totally up to you, though. So we'll have that deleted. Then a creative mail by New full digit. I'm not going to use Google Analytics, Wordpress, by Monster Insights. I'm not going to use. Hello Dolly, I'm not going to use. JetPack is useful. JetPack Perdct is also useful security tool that keeps your site safe and sound from pose to plugins. Again, your call if you want to use it. I personally would just keep JetPack over here. Opt in Monster is a WordPress pop up plugin. So you can use that if you want, but we don't really need that this time. WP Forms Lite is a Contact Form builder. So if you want to have a contact form on your site, you can keep this over here. Yos SCO is an SEO plugin, which I don't recommend. I have another SEO plugin that I like. So really the only ones I would consider keeping would be WPForms Lt. The Blows plug in, you don't need as well, so let me go ahead and deactivate that. Click what here to continue, skip and deactivate. There we go. Okay, so what am I going to be deleting? So for sure, creative mail. We don't need Google analytics by monster insights. We do want Google Analytics, but I don't usually like to use monster insights. If I want to check my analytics, I log in directly to Google Analytics. We don't need Hello Dolly, and JetPack is optional. JAPPECPtect is optional, as well. We don't actually need that activated at this time, too. There we go. Okay, so creative Mao, Google Analytics, LODlly then, well, we've Opt in Monster. If you want Dan, Blows Plugin. Again, if you want staging, keep it. To be performing to late is useful as a contact plugin. So maybe if you want to keep that one, and then Yos SEO we don't need as well. So go ahead over here, and then I'm going to delete. And then click on Apply. Click on Okay. And let's reload that so we have a better look at it. And it looks good over here. And there you go. So a chisme is for spam protection for comments. If you're going to enable comments on your site, JetPack is a multi purpose plugin that enables different features, like basic analytics and subscribe forms and whatnot. Jet PAC Protect is a protection plugin that hardens the security of your site. Opt in Monster allows you to create like pop ups. WP forms a light. It allows you to create different types of forms. So really up to you what you want to keep now, I don't have anything activated, but I'm going to leave these kind of pre installed because these are the most useful plugins that come with your installation of WordPress on Blue Host. Anyways, that's how you clean up pre installed content with your WordPress websites. 12. Wordpress Dashboard Overview: Welcome to your WordPress Dashboard. So by default, your dashboard comes with a few default blocks. So we have the site Health over here, quick draft, WordPress events, and news activity, and at a glance. So the site health links to the site Health underneath the tools section. So right there, tools, site Health. And this tells you, different things that you should do to improve your site. Telling us that we should maybe remove inactive plugins and inactive themes for security purposes. Your quick draft allows you to create a blog post right here, so you can just create a draft blog post very quickly and easily. If an idea pops in your head, just want to write it really quick right there. Activity shows you all the recently published items on your site and any recent comments that you can address at a glance shows you how many posts, pages, and comments on your site, and then WordPress events and news right over there. No, you can also drag and drop things around if you like. You can also minimize the design as well. So if you don't want all these blocks taking up so much visual space, you can just minimize them. And if you're like, I don't want these blocks at all, click on your screen options. Then over here is where you can activate or deactivate blocks as you see fit. So, for example, if I don't want Wordpress events and news or I don't want at a glance, whatever, I can remove it. Now, as you add on plugins to your site, it's going to add in additional dashboard blocks as well. So if you just want to manage everything, you just do so underneath the screen options. Now, underneath the Help tab right there, you have documentation, support forms, and the version of Wordpress you're running. So I definitely recommend checking out the support forms. If you have any question regarding a Wordpress theme or plug in, you need help in some way. The Wordpress forms are very active and very helpful. So let me minimize that. Then underneath the homelink you have the update tab right there, and this just tells you the Wordpress updates that you need to do. So at the click of a button, you can update your site. So you can get the latest version of WordPress. You can update plugins and you can update themes, right over here, and you want to make sure everything is updated. Then you have your posts, and you have all post add to post categories, and tags. So all blogposts are managed by categories and tags. Then you have your media library right there, so you can view your media library and you can add things to your media library. Then you have pages. You have all pages, and you can add in new pages. Comments over here, if you have comments enabled on your blog post, comments will appear over here. So this is where you can mark things as spam. You can trash different comments, and this is basically where you manage all your comments from. Now, under here with appearance, you click on appearance. This shows what theme you have installed as well as any additional themes that you have installed as well. If you want to delete a theme that you're not currently using, let's click on the theme like that. Then click over here to delete. Then your editor over here, this takes you to the full site editor. Really depends on the theme. If you're using a theme that takes advantage of Fols editor, this is what you're going to be looking at. If you have a different theme, like this is my actual business blog over here. I have appearance over there, then I have the theme file editor. And if I click on the theme file editor because it doesn't use the fulsEditor literally takes me to the PHP files that are managing the site design and layouts. So it just depends on what theme you're using. If it takes advantage of the fullest editor, you click on boom, the editor right there, you're going to be looking at this. If it doesn't use the Fullst editor, you're going to be looking at this over here. Okay. Anyways, you have your plugins, so you can install new plugins and you can add plugins, your users, so you have all your users. And you can add on additional users over here as well. So I have one user whose role is administrator. And if I want to add on additional users, maybe I want to bring on another writer or something like that, this is where you do that. Then you have your profile right here. And so your profile allows you to change different personal options and allows you to also set the password for your site. You have your tools right there, so you can import and export your site. That's quite helpful because that allows you to move your content, so you can export your site so you can export all of the blogposts and pages and content on your site, then import it into a new site. So if you have to move domain names, this is the tool that you're going to want to use your site health. We already covered, then you can export as personal data. So this is just for regulation purposes, depending on where you live. So for example, let me click on race personal data. This tool helps site owners comply with local laws and regulations. I mean, I've never had to use this you need to erase personal data for whatever reason, you can do so right there. Then the theme file editor. Okay, so this is where you can access the theme, file edit over here. Click on that. I understand with all your CSS and PHP files as well. So it's been moved underneath the tools, whereas Msigns underneath appearance. So again, just depends on the theme that you're using. You still get access to the PHP and CS files and all that good stuff if you want access to it. So don't worry, just because it's using the full site editor doesn't mean you're limited in any way. Then you have your settings tab right there, so you have general writing, reading, discussion, media, perminks and privacy. 13. Media Library Explained: Standing your media library. All right over here on the left hand sidebar, you have media. Underneath, you have library, then you have Add Media. To add additional media to your site, you just click on Add Media, and then you can upload a file right here by selecting the file, and then choosing the file that's on your computer, or you can just drag and drop into place right here and it will upload. Then it'll be added to your media library. Your media library primarily supports images, videos, documents like PDF files, and also audio files. I primarily use images, so this is my media library on my live site, but totally up to you, you'd probably want to embed videos from YouTube and vimeo somewhere like that to save your storage space with your hosting account. But you can upload a PDF document, like a menu or something like that, if you want, images and so forth. Now, over here, if we click into a file, let me click over here for this one as a quick example. You have your alternate text, title, caption, description, and the file URL. Okay, so the title right here is very important because this helps you search for images that you want to reuse. Even though I have this image right here for VPS for Dream Host, maybe I want to use it again in a different blog post. Maybe I have a dream host review blog post, then I have a tutorial on using dream host, whatever. Having an image and having a logical title, so you can just type in the title and search for the image makes it very helpful and you do that right there. So, for example, I have over here, I can just type in dream host and then show me all the images related to dream host that I upload to my site. But I couldn't do this if I titled it something other than dream host. So you want to make sure you title your images something logical that you can easily find via searching for everything via the media file right there. No, you also have the alternate text right there. So you want to leave this if the image is purely decorative, but ideally, you really shouldn't be uploading images just for decoration purposes. So if you're using an image to describe something within the blog post, then you want to add in the alternate text right there. So for this, for example, if this was added to a blog post, I would type this in, like, VPS, pricing or dream host. Okay so that helps search engines understand what the image is about if they can't load the image for some reason over here. I would keep it as simple as that. So the alternate text is quite important, and the title is quite important over here. Now, that's not the only way to add files to your media file. So when you're over here and you're in a piece of content, we click over here for, like, All posts. Let's go right there. Okay, we'll go to Hello World. And say I went over here, I clicked on this block right there. I typed in image. Boom, then I can upload an image right there, and it will be automatically added to my media library, okay? So, when you're in your piece of content and you're creating content, you don't need to add everything to the media library. Then click on Media Library. You can upload things directly to your blog posts and pages, and then it's automatically added to the media library. I'm just telling you when you're uploading images, just make sure to title things logically because one, that's good for SEO because you want the image could potentially rank within Google. So under Google Image search, and also just helpful for you, searching for things on your own site if you want to reuse an image for whatever reason, then also pay attention to the alternate text. When you add it to a piece of content, describe what the image is about. And if it's just decorative, then you don't have to describe what it is about. On top of that, you have different ways to organize the media library up top there. So you can have the Grid way or if you want a nice list, you can do that. You can search by all dates, and you can also smooh the images. You're like, What is that? Well, I added a plugin that compresses images. So we'll get into plugins in my recommended plugins later. But if you add in any type of image focus plugin, oftentimes something will pop up right there so I can compress the plugins at a click of a button right there. You probably don't have smooh installed, so you probably won't have this option right there. But again, that's what you can do with the media Libraries. So you can navigate over here, search for all your images, audio, video, document spreadsheet, archives, unattached. Mine was that mean? So if a users logged into their account, so you have multiple users, like one person's the administrator, another person's like a contributor, whatever, they can see any type of content that's attached to their specific account. Since you're the administrator of your account, all the images and files on the media Library Ogoring are going to be yours. Then dates, again, you can search for dates if you need to. And really that simple with the media library. 14. User Account Managment: User Account Management. Okay, so over here on the left hand side bar, you're going to see a tab called users and then all users. This is going to display all the users on your website, all the different accounts. So probably at this time, you probably have one account, the administrator account. So the administrator role is the highest level role on your site. It has full access to the site. You can add and delete pieces of content edit the site, and also delete other users. So be very careful about giving anyone administrator access to your website because then they have full control over the site. Now, right now, we only have one account right there, so we have the user name, name, email, the role, and the posts. So very, very simple. Now, as the administrator, you can also change the role of other accounts. So let's just pretend this was not the administrator account with something else. We can just click on it. Then we can change this role to something else like subscriber, contributor author or editor. Now, to add on new users is very simple. Just click over here to add a new user. Then you have to give it a username and email for the specific accounts. Now, the email has to be different from the administrator email. It can't be the same thing. Username can be whatever you like. Then the rest of the information over here is optional. Then just generate a password, and as you're creating this role, you can choose what you want them to be. Are they subscriber, contributor, author, editor? Whatever you select gives them different levels of access to your site. If that makes any sense. So pretty simple to add on new users. So this is quite useful if you're trying to hire an additional writer for your website, for example, then you want to maybe add them on as an author, so the author Roll can write pieces of content on your site without any limits, but they don't have access to, like, other things like the site design or deleting or editing other pieces of content that weren't written by them, things like that. So anyways, let's navigate back over here to all users. And if we click into our administrator accounts, we do have a couple of different options over here. So you do have syntax highlighting. You can disable that when you're editing the code. So that means the code won't be underlined with red when things are misspelled. So it's quite annoying when you're coding. And over here, the Admin color scheme, if you want to change the color scheme to something else, you can just do that. The language of the site you can change, username, you cannot change. Over here is quite important because you can create a nickname and display name publicly as. So, for example, what does this do right there? Right here, we have a blog post that says written by Edge of David. I'm like, Why don't of David. I want it to be my name. How do I do that? Easy, Backspace out of that. And then just add in your name. You can navigate over here, display name publicly as, then it pops up over here as the dropdown. So let's say you change the publicly displayed information right there. Then you have your email website, and then you have the biographical information over here. So this is if your theme is displaying an author bio. So you've seen at the very bottom of a blog post, like David has been a writer since 20 whatever, you know, that type of thing. That's where you add in the biographical information. It's not for the account. This information is typically displayed, and it may be publicly shown. So be careful with what you put in over here. So if your blog post is set up to display like an author buy at the very bottom, you can edit the information right there. Anyways, that's it for user account management. 15. Updating Your Password: Updating the password for your user accounts. All right, so this is a very simple process. You want to navigate over here to users, all users, then click on the user name right there. It's going to open up the profile with the personal options. Again, scroll to the very bottom. You're going to see something that says account management, then new password. Click on New password, and it's going to Auto generates a password for you that's quite strong. So then if you like this password, you can just click on Update profile and you're good to go. But if you don't want this password, you want something of your own that said something that you can remember, you can just type whatever you want in. And then once it says strong, and I do recommend going with a strong password for obvious reasons, once you're done, click on Update Profile. And that is how you set a new password for your user account. 16. Gravatar Setup: Ing up a Gavitar for your website. Okay, so Gavitar is a service that Wordpress provides that allows you to have an email and an image linked together. So as you can see right here, I have a profile picture, and here's my profile picture. This image is associated with this email, okay? I'm not uploading this directly in my WordPress dashboard, if that makes any sense. So why would you want to do this? So this is useful because if you're commenting on other sites or you're applying to comments on your own site, your image is going to be displayed with your comment if you're commenting as this email. So a quick example would be this over here. So on this blog, we have Jan Zach right there, and we have this image, and then we have the author of the site right there. So this is being powered by Gravitar. That's why you want to set that up. Okay. So anyways, let's navigate over here. How do you set this up? So a few things. You can click over here to change your profile picture on Gavitar. Just click on that link, and it's going to navigate you to Gavitar over here. So the first thing that you need to do is create a free Gavitar account. And then once you create an account, you're going to be logged in over here. And then underneath your avatars right there, you're going to have emails. So you can have multiple emails within one account. So you don't need to create multiple Gavitar accounts. You can have one Gavitar account, multiple emails. You got to set one email to be the primary. Not a big deal. Then as I navigate down here, you can just upload different images. Then you can cycle through the different emails and choose which image that you want uploaded with what respective email. And finally, as we can see over here with this comment using this random image and this image and this image, are all these people using the same type of image generator to come up with these images? Like, no, it's actually a setting within Wordpress on the back end. So if we navigate over here to settings and then discussion, scroll to the very bottom right there, you have the default avatar. So you can influence and change what default avatar is shown for people who comment on your site. It's a mystery person. Do you want to display other people's Gavitar logo or denticon? So this site over here is using Identicon. But I personally would suggest using gravitar logo. So if you have another Wordpress user or someone who's using Gravatar and they went through the time to have an image associated with the email, I think it looks better than just having these colorful random images. But again, it's your call. But anyways, that's how you set a gravita for your site, so you can have an image associated with your email when you're replying to comments on your site and also replying to comments and adding comments on other sites and also to change the look and feel of your own comment section via the discussion settings over here by setting the default avatar. 17. Optimal Permalink Structure: Up permit links for your website. So the permanink is the custom URL structure for your blog posts. Now, by default, it should be set to post name, and I do like post name, generally speaking, for most websites, it's the URL structure, the permink structure that I personally use on all my websites. Post name is best if your website is going to have maybe 1,000 blog post max. Now let me explain your different options. So right up top here, you have plane, so it would be P equals one, two, three. This is one of the worst ones because this doesn't have any descriptive information for search engines about how to index and organize your blog post. So you want the the URL structure to have keywords in it, so search engines understand what your piece of content is about. Then we have day and name and month and name. These are good if you're producing time sensitive content. If you're not producing time sensitive content, like a news website, then I would never, ever use dates in the URL. If I was to pick one or the other, I'd go with day and name right here if I was running a news website with time sensitive content. Numeric is another awful. You don't want numeric numbers, we want keywords in our URL structure, and that's why I like post name. You do have custom structure right down here. And so another custom structure that I do like if you're running a large website with thousands of blog posts and multiple categories, would probably be going like category post name. So you can just click down here to add it into your custom structure. So category and post name is good if you're running a very, very big website with multiple categories and so forth. But for most people, post name is what I would recommend. Another good structure, too would be to put blog in URL if you want. So that's useful because it helps separate the blog post from the rest of the website. So maybe if you're going to build out a site and you're going to have multiple features of the site like maybe a store, you're going to have blogposts. Maybe you're going to have tutorials. Having slash blocks slash post name helps separate everything. So if I set that up, then I have to create a dedicated blog page, which I'll show you how to do in just a minute. I just want to cover right down here your category based on your tag base. So what are categories? So all blog posts are structured and organized under a specific category within WordPress. You don't have an option. They have to be organized within a category. Right now I have the category of uncategorized. If you notice the structure up top there, it says category slash uncategorized. So this is the category title right here. Obviously, you want to give your categories something a little bit more logical that people can understand and navigate the site with. But I don't like this word category. And maybe you don't either. You can easily change that by putting in the category base and just typing in topics. And there you go. And that changes category to topics. So let me just show you a quick example. And we'll click over here, navigate to this page. And so open up marketing and branding, and you can take a look right there. So it's the oral.com slash TopiSlash Marketing Branding. And then this is my category page. So the category title is right there, a little bit more keyword rich and specific than categories. And I like the word topics personally. So that's what I would do. Tag base, I would leave that blank because I like the default slash tag, slash tag name. I like that structure personally, so I don't see any reason to change that. Now, I use post name, but some people like to use a customer structure of slash blog slash Post name. So someone who comes to mind that does is Neil Patel, back out of that. Slash Blog. There we go. And so let's take a quick look at this, and you can see his UR structure is slash Blogs Post Title. So that's useful because he's offering a wide range of things like services and results and training and tools, a bunch of different things, so it helps separate the blog from the rest of the website. So, how would you do that? Well, you have to create a dedicated blog page. Then just add in literally Ford slash Post Name. So you want to click on Save changes over here, there we go. So now I have blog in the custom structure right there. Then you have to navigate over here to page. Click on Add a page. Then you want to create a blog page. Ace out of that. There we go. Blog page right there. Then the slug we want to be slash Blog. Okay, then click on Publish and publish that. And that's how you would set this up. Now you can customize this dedicated page to be your blog roll page if you want. But anyways, that's what you need to know for the URL structure for your website. 18. General Settings: General settings for your website. So right over here under Settings, then we have General. This is where you can add in your site title and tagline. Typically, you can leave these blank because once you install an SEO plugin, the SEO plugin will override the site title and the tagline, if that makes any sense, which I'll show you in just a bit. General settings for your website. So over here, you can set your site title and your tag line. You can also set a site icon here as well. So the site icon is the little favicon icon right there. You see how this is a little Earth thing right there? Or let me open up my site as a quick example, see the DU thing right there. That is your site icons you just upload it right here within the dashboard. Here you have your Wordpress address and the site address, keep this the same, your administrative email address, then new user default role, site language time zone, date format, time formats, week starts, endurance cache, cache level, normal level two. I would leave that as this, leave it as standard. Then you can just click on any save changes. So overall, there's not much here that you need to adjust and change with your site. Even the site title because once you add in an SEO plugin, a dedicated SEO plugin, it's going to override the site title and tagline anyway. So general settings is overall kind of useless. For most people, you're really not going to spend any time here. Maybe the only thing you'd want to do is update the administrative email address. That's really the only reason why you'd ever really navigate to general settings in the first place. 19. Writing Settings: Adjusting your writing settings. So the primary setting that you want to pay attention to over here is your default post category. So right now it's set to categories because we have one category for our website. So let's jump over here to categories. We see one category. So let me go ahead and add in a new category. We'll call this one cameras. The sites called Vlog How, so we'll go ahead and add category right there. Okay, so now I have camera and I have uncategorized. As you notice with camera, you can delete this, but you can't delete this. That's because all block posts have to be organized within a category. Because this is the default category, it can't be deleted. You can change the name of it. So if you don't want to call it. If you don't want it to be called uncategorized, you want to give it a different name, backspace and change the name to whatever you want. You can also change the default post category over here under your writing settings. Now you have default post formats. All of this stuff is really dated. I would just leave it as standard because honestly, most Wordpress teams, I can't think of any Wordpress teams that support any of this default post format information. Then you have your post via email, so it's kind of strange you can post your site via email if you want. I'm not sure why you'd ever do that. You'd probably want to log into your website to post. But if you want to post via email, this is the settings right here. And then you have update services, so you can ping different services. I would just keep it as pingomatic.com. You don't want to be pinging outdated services because it's not good for your website. Anyways, it's all you need to know for writing settings. 20. Reading Settings: Editing and adjusting your reading settings. All right. So the first item is your homepage displays. By default, it's set to your latest post. But most people want to build out a custom homepage, so you want to click on a static page right there. Now, what page will be the homepage? You actually have to create a page and set it as the homepage over here. Same with the post page. The Post page is easier because that should be your blog page. So let's go ahead and set a homepage. So let's click over here for all pages and then click on Add page right there, and then literally title this homepage. We at of that. Homepage. Click on Publish, Publish again. All right. Now we navigate back over here. Click on the Wordpress icon. Go back to your settings, and then let's click on Reading again. Now, click on Static page. The homepage will be homepage. The post page will be the blog page. Simple as that. Now, your blog post page, this page right there or your latest post, we have it set to that. This is what controls how many blog posts will be displayed. Typically, you're going to probably use a masonry grid layout. So like box like three by three or whatever. So you typically want to keep this as like an odd number. So maybe nine makes a little bit more sense. Each post in a feed, full text or excerpt, I probably keep it as full text. Search engine visibility, discourage search engines from indexing the sites. Do not check this. You want search engines to index your website so you get organic search traffic. So let me click on Save changes. So right over here, we saved everything. Now you can see the Blog page is taking the Post page, and the homepage is taking the front page. So what does this mean? So let's navigate over here to the appearance. Let's open up the editor right there. And if you're using a theme that's using the full site editor, it's going to inherit the template over here. So let's take a look homepage or sorry, the blog is taking the post page. So Where's the post page? Let's take a look, blog home. There we go. So blog home right there. So this page right there is taking the post page. It's inheriting this blog home layout. So let me click over here for that. And X out of that. So the template right there as you see, it says blog home right here, blog home. That's where it's controlling that. Alright, so let me back out of that. Now we have the homepage. Homepage is taking the front page. So let's click over here. Homepage. But right now, the homepage is taking the page template. Where's the page template? Page template is right here. Now, if you click on Adi Template over here, you're going to notice something that says front page. So you can click over here for front page, and then you can custom design the home page of your website right over here. So this will be the template, the design and layout of your home page. Okay? So that's how this works. So let's click over here, this nice big one right there. Looks good. We click on Save. There we are. And so we've just added a template. So now we see the front page right there. So now if we take a look at our site, just as a quick example, it should be inheriting that design. Yep, perfect. So that's how this all works. That's why we want to set this as the front page so it inherits the front page template that you then can customize to your liking. You happen to be using a theme that doesn't use the full site editor, the way you'd customize your homepage is literally clicking into the homepage, and then just using the block Builder over here, clicking on the blocks and adding in different blocks to custom design this page over here because right now, if you're going to add in blocks, I could add in whatever block I want over here, so let's click on browse all. We'll just click on patterns over there, starter content, whatever. Click on Nats done. Alright. Quick away from Ns. So we have all this content right here, but it's not going to be displayed. Why? Because this is currently set to the front page template. So the front page template, which is right here, overrides anything you put in on the actual page itself, because you want to customize the front page template to customize your homepage. That's only if your theme is using this full site editor. If it's not, then you have to navigate directly to the page itself to customize the homepage. Anyway, let's back out of this. Go ahead and leave. Navigate the settings, reading right there. And there you go. So that's what you need to know about the homepage display and how to set a homepage and set the blogpost page and so forth. Then your blog post page will show nine posts at most, the feed, searching visibility. So that's really all you need to know for your reading settings. 21. Comments and Discussion: Editing and adjusting your discussion settings. So your discussion settings are where you can control who can comment on your blog if anyone can comment on the blog. Over here, you have your default post setting, so attempt to notify any blogs linked to from your blog post. I'd probably keep that. A lot of link notifications from other blogs and track backs. That's up to you if you want to enable that. A people submit comments on new posts, that's fine. Automatically close posts on specific amounts of time, like a week or a month, whatever it is you want. Users must be registered and logged into comments that would require people to become a subscriber of your site for free, but they just have to fill out their email and user name and create a subscriber accounts, and then they can comment. Most people aren't really going to do that. Then comments must fill out their name and email as well. Again, comments on a blog are a dated thing now, so it's not really that big of a deal. Then you have comment page nation right there. So if your blog post had 100 comments, it would break that up into showing 20 comments per page and adding additional pages right there. Email me whenever anyone posts a comment or a comment is held for moderation. For a comment appears, comments must manually be approved. So when people comment on your site, it'll be appearing over here and then you can approve or market as spam. Author has previously approved comments. So that means, if you approved someone who's already published a comment on your site and they come back and comment on another blogpost because you already approved it previously, automatically gets approved. Comment moderation, so hold a comment if it contains two or more links or one link. So if people are linking like a hyperlink, that's indication of spam typically. And also, you can add in a specific word. So if people type in a word right here that you think is going to be spammy or something like an offensive word, whatever, you can put that in right there, disallowed comment keys. So comment contains these words in its comment, author name, URL, the user's Agent string will be put into trash, so forth. So people who have been spamming your site, you can just block them right here. Then again, like I showed earlier, you can have your avatars right there. I personally would leave it as the graviti logo if you're going to enable comments. Me personally, I don't use comments, so I usually just don't uncheck all of this. I don't want anyone commenting on my site. So that's how I usually do it keep it very, very simple. But if you want to enable comments, that's what you need to know. And then finally with your individual blog post over here, under the Post tab, you have your discussion right there. So over here, you can manually open and close a blog post for comments as you like. So right now, for example, I could have the entire site be closed off for comments, but I want this specific block post to be open for comments, you can do that. Or vice versa, maybe your entire site is open for commenting, but I want this specific blog post to be closed. You can have that kind of granular control with your discussion. Anyways, that's it for your discussion settings. 22. WordPress Themes Explained: What's our Wordpress themes. So WordPress themes in a nutshell are just pieces of software that you install on the back end of a Wordprens installation, and those themes are what control the look, feel, and design of your websites. Now, in my opinion, there's really three types of themes. So the first type of theme is like the 2020, whatever theme. This takes advantage of Wordpress' full site editor. So the full site editor is this aspect right here. Let me just click on Editor, over here where you edit and adjust your site based on the templates. Okay, so you have a template for the blog homepage. You have a template for your homepage, your pages, your blog posts, the search result pages, so you can customize the design of your website by editing the templates. Okay? This is called the full site Editor. Alright, so that's the full site editor, and some things take advantage of the full site editor. So themes do not. So the Astra theme, for example, doesn't take advantage of the full site editor. It is a Block Building theme. It takes advantage of the Gutenberg Block Builder that's built in the Wordpress, but it doesn't leverage the full site editor. So let me go ahead and click on Activate over here. Okay, so new theme activated. We'll click on Visit Site. Take a look. Okay, so here's a nice base theme. The Astra theme out of the box doesn't look like much, but what's helpful is that you can really easily customize the design of your website over here. Okay, so we'll go over here to plug ins, and we'll type in actually, go ahead and add a plug in, and we'll add in Astra starter sites. Okay, so starter templates over here for Astra. We'll click over here for install this and go ahead and activate it. And we're just going to click over here for classic starter templates. So this plugin, Astra starter sites is a plug in that's made by the team that builds the Astra theme. So we're just going to click over here. I'm using the Wordpress Block Builder. I'm not using Elementor. We'll get to Elementor in just a bit. So to click on Nats over there, and let's click on Love Nature right there. Then we'll click on Continue. Great. So let's go ahead and click on view your website over here. So we have a nice starter template already designed. And so let's navigate over here to the WordPress dashboard, and it automatically we'll install pages and everything that we need. So let's click over here for pages. As you can see, a bunch of other information over here that's already set. So let's go over here to appearance. And then we want to customize the appearance. Okay, so once you click on the customize appearance, you're going to be looking at the customization section over here. So we have a bunch of different options over here on the left hand sidebar that you can edit and adjust. So Global, your header, for example, over there, the site title and logo. Then you have this information right down over here. So the site logo, primary menu button, that's controlling this element right here. And so this is how you kind of edit your website with the Astro theme. And this is Wordpress' block Builder over here. You click away from that. Let's go back to the sites over here, and then I want to edit this specific page. So it's the homepage. And I'm currently editing the homepage over here, so it's the homepage layout. You can also edit and adjust using the Block Builder over here. So I'm clicking on things, and it's popping up as a block. And so that's also how you can adjust your site as well. So we can click over here. I click on this plus sign. I can click on Browse. Then I click on patterns over here. We'll click on maybe called action as an example. Then we have a bunch of different patterns. I can click on that schedule visit. Again, it's using WordPress is Block Builder. Alright, so anyways, let's back out of that. And let's go back over here to appearance and at themes. Alright, so those are the first two types of themes, right? So you have your default themes, the 2020, whatever, they take advantage of the full site editor, okay? So themes take advantage of the full see editor, some do not. Then you have themes like the Astra theme, which have like custom templates and whatnot and leverage the Wordpress Block Builder and the Gutenberg block Builder, but not the fulls editor. Okay. Then finally, you have themes like the hello elementor theme. So by activate this theme over here, then it's going to tell me to install the elementor plug in because the hello theme from Elementor is an elementor specific theme. Okay? So it only leverages the element elementor block Builder. Okay, so I just installed the plug in right there. So we have Elementor over here, and there we go. So now I want to customize my site design, so let's open the site up over here. Okay, so it did inherit some elements from the Astra theme. So let me click over here to edit this with the Elementor plug in just to show you what that experience is like. I'm personally not a big fan of Elementor because I find it to be a framework on top of a framework, Wordpress already has a Block Builder and the Gutenberg Builder and the full site editor. This is another framework that's built on top. But again, this is how Elementor works. So over here, you have your different layouts and your basic elements that you can add into the page. Very powerful and very feature rich. You can really build out a custom design website using Elementor. It's quite powerful, but it has a steep learning curve, in my opinion. But Elementor is powering millions of sites. It's incredibly powerful. And the hello theme is a great base level theme that comes out of the box really basic and that takes full advantage of the Elementor Page Builder. But really, it's how it is. Just add in different page elements over here, you click on the plus sign and drag additional widgets. Then you have your divider information, you get content, the style, advance, you get a specific granular details over every single element you add to the webpage, and that's why people like Elementor, particularly web designers, because you can really custom build out a full custom design website, even if you don't really know how to code that well, just because it provides such granular control over different elements. Right, let's navigate over here, back to appearance, and then back to themes. So that's the first type of theme, 2020, whatever that use the full Site editor. Some themes use the full site editor, some do not. Then you have themes like the Astra theme, which take advantage of the Guttenberg block Builder. And then you have some themes that use the Elementor based plug in Block Building system. Then you finally the last type of theme are just custom themes. So my site is using a custom theme that I built myself. It doesn't use any type of Gutenberg Blockbuilder or anything. It uses HML and CSS. Obviously, when I'm creating a blog post, it's going to have the Block Builder and specific pages over here. So let's take a look at the About page. Like this is just a page design with text and elements added in using the block Builder. Okay? So on over here, this all basic stuff from that's provided by Wordpress. But those are really three primary types of themes, ones that use the full site editor, themes that use the Elementary Page Builder, and then themes that don't use the full site editor, but still use the Gutenberg Block Builder. Then your last type of theme are your custom themes that don't really take advantage of any type of framework. They're really just custom design, and they take advantage of the basic features built in the Wordpress. Like Blockbuilder is within your post in at pages. So, if I open up this over here and we just add in a new post right there, and let's take a quick look. So over here, I can add in blocks right there. Like this is what my site is taking advantage of the basic block Builder. If that makes any sense. So in a nutshell, that's what you need to know about themes. Okay? Those are the different types of themes, full site editor or element or the Guttenberg Block Builder or a custom theme that just uses, like, basic coding, CSS, PHP, that type of thing on the back end. Anyways, all the WordPress themes are are software on the back end to help you edit, design, and customize your website. A a 23. Where to Get WordPress Themes: Exactly do you get WordPress themes from? So there are a few different spots. So first off, all these themes over here, when you search for a theme, when you go here to add a theme, and then search for themes over here, these themes are part of the WordPress theme directory. So over here, we have wordpress.org slash TheMES and you can search for themes over here. And you can also do the same thing when you're logged in to WordPress. Now you also have a few other different options so you can use a theme marketplace. One of the most popular is Invoto Market. So web themes and Templin. So we have over here with WordPress and then blog magazine, corporate, creative, directory, e Commerce, Elementor, entertainment. We have all these different themes that are optimized for this one's optimized for Elementor right there. And then other ones are optimized for a specific industry vertical. So, for example, if you're trying to build a real estate website. Well, real estate website needs specific features. So you have, these premium themes over here. And this is nice because it's a one time fee. You buy, you own it, you get updates for life. That's why I like Envato Marketplace when buying themes you get lifetime support for any theme that you buy. You can also go to Indie creator, as well. So one that comes to mind would be like Elegant Themes over here. So they have a very good theme. That's like Drag and Drop Builder, very intuitive and easy. And again, you can just navigate to over here to elegant themes.com, and then you can buy the DV theme right there, unlike the Power DiV, get DIV today, and then you have to make a purchase over here. And then once you do buy a theme, if you got a theme over here from Envato Market or here, like, from Elegant Themes, upload it to your site because it's not part of the theme directory. These are paid themes, and paid themes are usually have a lot of thought and care into the design and whatnot. So they're not free. You got to pay for them. You download to your computer, then you get a zip file, then you can upload the theme. So when you overhear appearance themes, click over here to upload a theme. Then you want to choose the file, and then you click on Install. So for example, I have a premium theme that I bought called carbonate and carbonate right here is carbonate 2.0. You just click on N, click on Open click over here to Install Now. And it's as simple as that. I'll say installing theme and then theme installed successfully. Let's click over here to go to themes. And then, boom, there we go. There's a theme that I just installed the premium theme. So that's all you need to know. So you can buy premium themes from Indie creators or from marketplaces, or you can get a free WordPress theme from the WordPress theme directory. 24. Explore the Full Site Editor: Say Editor, often abbreviated as FSE is a software tool that's built into your installation of WordPress. And this is part of WordPress. Now, some themes take advantage of it, other themes do not. Now, how do you edit and adjust your website with the full S editor? Well, the way this primarily works is by way of blocks and sections and your templates. So if we click over here for templates, these are all the different templates currently installed with this theme, and they control their respective vertical. So for example, we have Blog Home right there. So what is that controlling? So let's navigate back over here to the WordPress dashboard. We have homepage and blog. I have created these two dedicated pages right there. So let's click over here for settings. We'll go to reading. Click on Static Page Homepage homepage. Post page will be Blog page. We'll click on Save Changes. There we go. Okay, so let's navigate back to pages. Now you can see blog, and blog is taking the Post page. So what's the post page would be Blog Home. So let's click over here for that. But click into this and away from that. And over here, you have the template. So blog home. See how it says blog home. It says Blog home right there, this template. Your template is right there. See how it says Template, blog home, boom, template, blog home. So if I want to control the look and feel of this, the template is going to override any design. By adding blocks over here, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I add in anything over here, because if I want to control the design of that, I have to navigate to the template, click into the template, then edit and adjust the template. If that makes any sense. So that's why the full set editor can be a little bit confusing for some people. Now, me close out of this. Let's close out of that. We'll weave that. And let's go back to appearance and jump over here to the editor. Now, I went ahead and established a homepage to be the front page. So that's just what's called front page. A lot of people refer to as homepage. But right here, the template, as you can see, it's taking the Pages template. Well, I don't want that. I don't want this to be taking this template right here, the Pages template, where it shows, if I click over here for pages, here is the feature image, H one title tag, and then the content block. I don't want that. I want to have a custom design homepage. So we have to add in a template. So let's go over here to add Template. Then we have a front page template right there. Let's go ahead and add that in. And now you have two options. Either you can just choose a design over here that you like go with that. If you click on Skip, then you have a completely blank design. Editing with this is pretty fun and easy. I'm going to show you this is why people like the foul site Editor and the Block Builder with WordPress. So a couple of things right away. Let's click over here to show the settings, and click over here for Designs, and this shows you the designs that popped up if you're just curious as to how to navigate back to that. I'm going to X away from that. I'm going to go ahead and click on plus Browse. Then you want, click on patterns. And your patterns I describe as like sections, blocks, whatever, you can just click and add something to your site. So let me just show you a quick example. Let's go over here to headers. The top section of your website it's called the headers click on Net. There we go. Okay, so we have a couple of different headers that we can use. I quite like this one right there. Click on Ns. That looks great. X away from that's looks good. Okay, so then you can just add items to the block right here, and I call action right there. And so forth, maybe make this a little bit smaller like that. There we go. Now, if I want to add in more, let's go up here to the plus sign. Go back over here to patterns. Maybe click over here for the About section. And let's go ahead and add in maybe this one right here. Boom. Let's add in that. And there we go. Away from that. And that looks good. So we got the section right there. We have this block right there. Click on that, maybe make that less big. Anyway, I want to add in another block Rigo, same thing. It's that simple. That's why people like this. So have a call to action as well, and I'll go ahead and add in we'll see this one right there. There we go. Okay, so we have this section right there, this section right here, this section right there. If you want to move any section around, you click on it. Then you have little arrows right there, and then you can move things around. And so this is why people like the full site editor because this is how you edit and adjust your site. Very easy. So just like, add in sections via the plus sign right there, via your patterns. Then you have different blocks, as well. And then down over here. And then again, you want to add in additional blocks. You click on the plus sign. You can add in browse all, add in different blocks to this section over here and so forth. So that's really what you can do with this. That's why it's quite powerful. So let's click over here actually add in a footer patterns and a footers your bottom of your website. So it's a nice footer right there. Yeah, this looks good. Okay, so that looks good overall. Quick, easy design for the homepage. Looks good.'s go build this out. Me. Let's click on save. Alright. So there we go. Let's click and get out of that. Anyway, so that's how you add in different sections using the full site editor and what not. So it's quite helpful. I go more into detail with how did it properly design different websites with the full site editor later in the course. This is going to be a high level overview. And so that's really it. So I just want to make the point that you're editing via templates. Now, we have this front page design over here. If I navigate over here to the homepage, just revote the page. As you can see, there's nothing over here. There's absolutely nothing. It's completely blank. This is the homepage, but it's inheriting the template front page template page. Even if I add in blocks over here, it doesn't matter because the template overrides whatever the design is over here. Because this is like the content section. What that specifically means is let me navigate down here and let's click on this right there, and we'll click on plus over here and I'll type in contents. All right. So content. This is the content block. It will display all the blocks in any single post or page. So if I click over here for the content block, now we'll display whatever I put in over here. So if I have some type of pattern over there, we'll just say, actually, keep it simple. I'll type. Hello world. Keep that simple right there. And maybe add in, I don't know. Let's go ahead and add in a quick little contact page. Yeah, we'll add in that little section right there. Click on Save. Rights. There we go. Click on Save, save. Okay, away from thats. Let's reload this. And now we should see the content. Yeah, there we go. You have the content section right there. Low World and this block that we added in that I added in over here on the homepage because I added in a content block. I don't recommend doing this, by the way. Now, if you're going to edit the homepage template, don't add in the content block. So we can just get rid of that over there. Boom. I would just stick to different structured blocks over here with your patterns and just add that in over here. Then click to customize each element to your liking. And finally, with the full sites editor, if we click in over here again, we click over here, click over here for block, you have specific granular control over specific blocks. So if I click on that block, you see, specific details for this block right here for this image and so forth. I click over here for the text, then it gives me different styles right there. Now if I click over here for templates, just tells me what I'm doing right there. Now if you're like, What's this little circle? This right here is your styles, your broad styles for your entire website. That element right there. Let me back out of that is the same as this. So it's exactly the same. So if you just want to browse styles, you want a completely different style, the kind of base level style to change your site around, you can play around with this. But again, this controls the whole entire theme. I like to have a custom theme and custom look and feel of the sites, so usually just leave it as default. But totally up to you. But just remember styles are broadly speaking for the entire site. Anyways, that's it for the full site editor. 25. Gutenberg Block Builder: The Guttenberg, Block Builder. So one feature I really like about WordPress is this block Builder that's built into Wordpress now. So obviously, of course, you can just write contents. There you go. Write content as you like, but you have the ability to add in different design elements very easily. So click on the plus sign, click on Browse all, and here you go. So you have blocks right there. You have text blocks like paragraph, heading, list, quotes, pre formatted, and so forth. Then you have media right there. So images, audio, media, and text. Have design elements right there, like a separator, a page break, a grid layout. You have widgets over here. If you want to add that in as well, you have theme specific things like site title, site logo, categories. Obviously, this would be if you're editing and adjusting a template, you wouldn't really add this into a specific page, but you have access to it over here. You have your Embed. So WordPress is pretty good. Like you just copy and paste a YouTube link over here, it'll automatically use the YouTube Embed, but you have access to choose a specific Embed as you want, and then you have your blocks have been added by a plugin right down there. Of course, you also have access to your media. So you have all content starter content, But banner. And again, it works this way where you just click over here. There we go. So I just built out a full page right here at the click of a button, and then you can just edit and then design this as you like. And of course, when you click on a block, you have to have this open over there. And like before, you just click on the block that you want to adjust and then you have your page, then you have the block setting right there. Then you choose the block setting to change things. So, for example, if I click on this block right there and I click over here for styles, then it has the different styles to change the color and the look and the feel of all this good stuff over there. And again, you can just write content, or you can add in different sections as you like. Like, you're creating your About page and want to make it more stylized, you can just do that via patterns as well. So click over here again, browse all. Patterns about, and we'll go ahead and add in a nice about section at the very top right there. And there we go. So it's as simple as that. So let me show you a real world. Like example. Here is my resource page over here. Let me just take in the back end and show you how I designed this overall. Like how do you create a page like this? So in the back end over here, so I have my H one title tag, which is the title of the page. Then over here, I just standard text. Then I went over here to the block, then I made the custom size a little bit bigger. So I made it 22, so it's nice and big. Then the text right there, I made it small. So again, smaller. So it's very easy to, like, not easy, but it's easy to read over here because it's nice and big. But then disclaimer, I want it to be small. I don't want to stand out too much. So make it small like that. Then over here, this is a table of contents block. So let me click on the plus sign. Right here, I'm using a plugin called stackable, and this is my table of contents block over there. So I'm just including the H two title tags that are listed below right there. X out of that. And then over here with advance over there, you have the position, custom attributes, and so forth. But right here with the style, boom H two title tag, only show that columns two, boom, column gap a little bit. So there's some space right there and really that simple. And then this is like the H two title tag. And so that's why this is popping up because it's taking that. Then this block right here is a featured version two block. So let me navigate down here and we'll click over here, click on plus. Featured version two looks like this. So it's the title of the block, description, button text, and the image. And so then you change the layout. I go, I like basics, so it looks like this, then add in an image, change the button color and text, just to match and be consistent. And it's really that simple and powerful. And this works because this looks great. It converts, people click on it and so forth. But that's how you can edit and design things with WordPress as well in the block Builder. And, of course, this is WordPress, so I can click over here browse. I still have access to patterns over here that I can use, so I can call to action if I want to add that in to the very bottom of my site for some reason. I want to add that in right there. I can change the title right there, download my cheatsheet, my guide, watch my master quit. Whatever I want to do, I can add that in at the very bottom. If I felt like it, then you can just custom design the way this looks over here. So like, maybe I want the background text to be like that color or that color. Again, that's why people like the Gutzmbergblock Builder because you can easily create beautifully designed pages and block post for your sites with different pieces of content to make the site more useful for the end visitor. Like, this is nice right there with a nice big text. This looks good. Like, that looks like a proper disclaimer in small text, a nice little section right there where users can click on that, takes them to the specific section on the page. Nice big block over here, that is high converting because it's beautifully designed with button and the image over there, all the little details. That's what you can do with the block Builder. You can add in specific patterns as well and specific blocks, again, to build out your site and edit and design everything as you see fits. 26. Elementor Explained: Mentor. So Elementor is another framework that's very popular for designing your Wordpress powered website. It's functionally a plug in, and it overrides the full editor and the Blockbilder and all that good stuff for editing and designing your pages, okay? Now, wow, it's a plug in, it's technically compatible with all themes, it does override a lot of Wordpress features, and it's really made to be designed and used with specific themes. One being the hello Elementor theme, which is made by the team behind Elementor. So anyways, I have this theme over here. Installed and activated, and I'm being prompted to install Elementor. So let me go ahead and go through that process show you what this is like. We'll just click on Skip Skip Skip and skip over there. Okay, so now Elementor is loading. Okay, so here is Elementor. So we have a blank page over here. Okay? So where I'm at right now is just on a basic blank page. So we have Global over here. So meet our global widget. You have to upgrade that access to that. You have your widgets over here, and then you can just drag and drop things into place. So drag widgets here. So for example, maybe I want a header. We just drag and drop it right there. Okay. Then we have different styles over there, different advanced tools, and so forth. We click on the plus sign to add in more elements. So maybe I want a text editor. We'll add that in right there. Okay, click on a plus sign again. Maybe I want a spacer. Click on that, add that there, click on the plus again, and then go through this. And then that's really what you do with mentor. You drag and drop different elements in DuBois. That's why it's called Elementor. We'll take on a YouTube video, drag and drop that there, and there we go. And then you can choose your video, so click over here for the video. Click to pause that. Now, the source is YouTube, the ink is this right there, supports video, daily Motion, video press, and self hosted. Like you have a video uploaded to your WordPress website directly. Anyways, this is what Elementor is, okay? So, out of the box, it comes with a couple of different features where you can import a design and customize a design and go from there. I would describe Elementor is very powerful. You can design a very custom looking site. You have a lot of granular control, as you can see. So if I click over here for the text, add your heading text here. We can just change that to like, there we go. Then header one, we'll just call it right there. Styles over here, you change the alignment, typography, text stroke over here, a lot of little details you have access to if I want to make that a little bit more bored, like that and vertical. Like, again, you can just play around with this. There's a lot of different features. It really nice and effective, in my opinion, for using El mentor for, like, building out product page, things like that, a sales page. I think that's where Elementor shines. Elementor is also really good because it integrates well with Wu Commerce, which is Wordpress' E Commerce plugin. And also Elementor is really good at designing pop ups. In addition to that, you have a structured section right there that shows you the structure of the page. And over here, you have your site settings global colors, global fonts, typography. Utop here, you have your different pages so can add in a new page and begin designing a brand new page on the sites over here. You can see how your site looks on a tablet, on a phone, on desktop over there, Checklist what's new. Finder, search for different elements that you want to use. Just little details like that. And finally, you have access to the theme Builder. So let me click over here. So you have theme Builder, history, user preferences, keyboard shortcuts and exit to Wordpress. So I click over here for theme Builder. You can customize every part of your site, so this is kind of similar to the full site editor. So you have different sections that you can just jump into and change. So we click over here for header. Again, you need to upgrade to a paid account with elements or have access to this, but this allows you to just add in, again, theme Builders for your specific templates really quick and easily. In the advantage of Elementor over the full site editors, it does give you a little bit more granular control and a lot more little detailed options for each specific elements on the webpage. Okay, so now we're back to the Wordpress editor. So we have two options at the very top right there, it's back to WordPress Editor edit with Elementor. If you click over here, Back to Wordpress editor, please note that you're switching to the Wordpress default editor, your current layout design and content might break. So that's something you have to be aware of with Elementor. Elementor, again, overrides most of Wordpress' feature. So just be aware of that, if you do decide to go with Elementor and you design a beautifully designed website, et cetera, with all these different features in Elementor, you're going to be stuck using Elementor. Like, if you stop paying for it, you can lose access to premium features and trying to switch back to the Wordpress Editor. Again, your site more than likely is going to break. But if you're looking for a powerful framework to design your website, then you may want to consider learning Elementor. It's a framework on top of a framework, but like I keep saying, it does provide a lot more detailed granular control over the look and feel of your website than you get with other themes, even the full site editor. 27. WordPress Plugins Overview: What are WordPress plug in. So over here on the left hand sidebar, down here in Plugins, you have installed plugins. You can add a plug in and then the plug in File Editor. The plug in file editor allows you to edit the files, the specific files associated with a plugin. What a plugin is is just a piece of software that adds functionality onto Wordpress that Wordpress doesn't natively have. And there's tens of thousands of plugins, to be honest with you, that all do a wide range of things. Now, to add on a plug in, you just click over here to add a plugin. And then you have featured plugins right here on the first tab. So these are pretty popular plugins that are widely installed. Then you have over here, popular plugins. So you have Elementor, Contact Form seven. Like this adds a contact form to your site. Yos SEO is an SEO plugin. Wu Commerce adds Ecommerce functionality, so you can sell physical and digital products via your WordPress website. Give another form plug in right there, WPForms, Akismt, block Spam, all in one Wordpress migration and backup that helps you move your site from one host to another host or move from one domain to another domain. Really simple security that helps you with your SSL certificate. If your web post is having some type of issue with that just a little different things. And then right up top here, you can just type in a key word and it adds whatever functionality you're searching for. So let's say, for example, I wanted to search for a pop up plug in like a plugin that creates pop ups. I would type in pop up or pop ups. Email marketing, let's just see what it comes up with. There we go. So pop up to Wordpress, exit intent pop ups, email, pop up Builder, Whitebox, and there you go. And that's it for plug ins. They're just pieces of software that add on additional functionality. You can search for Plugins via specific keywords of something that you're looking for, like a specific feature. Obviously, you can also use Google or an AI tool to do that, as well. And over here, you can change the keyword, author, tag. I find that keyword is the most useful if you're looking for a specific feature that you want to add on to your website. 28. Where to get WordPress Plugins: Where do you get plug ins from? So there's a few different spots. So first off, and the most popular spot is the Plug in directory. So extend your Wordpress experience Bows over 59,000 free plugins. So you have a bunch of plugins over here that are added into the Plugin directory. You don't have to navigate to wordpress.org slash PlugNs. You just have access to this on the back end of your WordPress installation. When you're searching for plugins, all these plugins that you see available are part of the Plugin directory. Now you can also go to a marketplace to get additional plug in. So, for example, Invado Markets, Wordprestens, and templates over here, and then they also sell specific plugins you can get access to over here. And there's quite a few different marketplaces, but I would say Them force is the most popular marketplace to purchase plug ins. Then there's also individual tools and sales pages selling a specific plug in. So one that comes to mind would be like Link Whisper over here. So you can buy this plug in, then you have to download it to your computer and then upload it Wordpress. So how would you do that? So if I went through this process, I clicked on ByNow and I bought a Plugin, how do you add it to your site? Well, to do that, you have to go over here to upload Plugin. You download it to your site and you'll get a zip file. Then you click over here to Choose File, then Install now. It's really that simple. Because this plug in right here, this link whisperer plug in, this is not part of the plug in directory. It's a paid plug in, so it's not going to be here for free. So again, you have to buy it, download the zip file, upload the zip file, install now, and then you'll usually get some type of activation code with your account over here to kind of link the two, and it's really that simple. And the same process works when you buy a plugin from a plug in marketplace as well. 29. How to Correctly Use Categories and Tags : Categories and tags. All right, so all your blog posts need to be organized into specific categories. In my opinion, you should have four to six categories to start off with, and then you can expand from there. Maybe you want to have like 90, 100 blogposts per category. Then you want to create a new category, if that makes any sense. So it really depends on how much content you're producing and what your website is about. So let's just take a quick look. Neil tel.com slash sitemap dot XML. Take a quick look at his categories over here. All right. So we have post site Map one, two, three, four, so let's go over here to the category site map. And you can see he has a bunch of different categories. He has content marketing, conversion rate optimization, email marketing. He has broad general marketing, entrepreneurship. And then right over here, he has paid ads, social media. So you want to have a bunch and then he's translating his site into different languages. So that's why you see so many different categories in Spanish and German and whatnot. So you can do that with your site as well. There are plugins that translate your website, so you can leverage that. But with regards to categories, you want four to six to start off with, and those four to six categories should be descriptive and help explain and help search engines understand what your website is about. And then when you publish a piece of content, put one blog post per category. So let me click over here. This is my category page. So by default, you're going to have your website.com slash category. I change category to topics, so it's my website.com slash Tops. And then I just design this page. I didn't have to do this. I just wanted to do this because I like having a helpful page people can navigate too. And on the back end, this is literally just a wordpress page over here. And then I have the slug right there. So it'd be categories. Again, I changed this to topics. Then I just added design elements to this page, very, very simple. Nothing complicated. Oh, over here, like, that's an emoji. I just typed in rocket emoji, copy and pasted it in. And let's take a look over here. This is a search function at the very top right there. That's hard coded into this page via HTML. If you don't know how to do that, no problem. You click over here, you type in search. Then a search bar right there. You can just use a block over here to add that in if you want optional placeholder. Search search a topic. You have that right there. So you can build that in at the click of a button down here are just blocks. So advanced column blocks, it's a two column, two column, two column. And then I just click buttons and designed it to make it look nice, and I manually added in these specific pieces of text right there, and then hyperlinked it to the respective page. And I'm having six articles on my site or six topics on my site for my categories. And so I would suggest doing something similar. Now you have the individual category page or topic page. This is how I have it built out. So slash topics, then the name of the category, the name of the topic right there. And again, this is just built out and has a links has affiliate links and links to all related articles for this specific vertical. And how is that working on the back end? So we click over here for categories and come down here for Internet business, you open up that, then this opens up your category page right there. And so I have the name, slug right there or the URL, and then literally the description. So I had to publish all that content right here. So it's not a separate page. I did that under here in the category section. And then it looks like this. And so it's very helpful. Instead of just being a bland vanilla category page, like categories, and that's it. I actually make it a little bit helpful for the end visitor and also monetize it in a nice with affiliate links and whatnot right there, and there you go. All right, so that's categories. Everything needs to be organized in categories, 46 categories as they make sense for your website. You don't want irrelevant categories like thoughts, feelings, uncategorized. Like, if you have a car blog, you want, different types of cars, like Tesla or whatever. And there you go. So anyways, now you have tags, and tags are more granular. You don't have to use tags. It's optional. But tags are like if you're writing about a topic a handful of times. So maybe your category is like, backpacking, or your category is like Southeast Asia or Europe if you're like a travel blog. But then a tag would be France. That makes sense? So like, over here, I have a bunch of different tags, like affiliate marketing or comparison, for example. Like let's click on the comparison tag right there, and the slug here is verses. So if we back out of this, you know, I type in tag, then verse. And the reason I have this specific tag is this doesn't make sense to be a category, but it makes sense to have this on my site. Like this is on my comparison post. This verse, this, that verse that, and so forth. So again, tags are optional, but tags are used to tag specific pieces of content if you're talking about a topic, a specific topic, a handful of times, okay? It's not like social media. You don't want to create a bunch of tags to help your piece of content rank like you would on Instagram or YouTube or whatever. Tags are for organizational purposes only. So I only tag piece of content if I'm going to be talking about something like a handful of times. So I'm not tagging everything a bunch of different times. So like my review post, I tag that as review post. So, I have a review post for domain names and web hosting and different types of software tools, you know, that type of thing, or YouTube. Like, YouTube is not like a category that I talk about. It's not like a main thing, but I do bring up YouTube as it relates to Internet marketing, so I have a tag for YouTube. Again, tags are totally optional. You don't even need to use tags if you don't want to, but you do have to use categories again. I have to organize your website, logical categories, 46 categories as it makes sense for your websites. And then finally, like I just mentioned, I do suggest that maybe you build out your category page to make it a little bit stylized and helpful and then link internally to your specific categories over here, that links to the category page, so that and that, then you have your best in class content as it relates to the category. This just makes this page very helpful. It's good for, like, internal linking, but also helps people find useful piece of content on your site. Anyways, that's it for categories and tags. 30. How to Structure a Blog Post : How to blog. Alright, so we're going to be using blogging for content marketing purposes because I'm sure that's probably why you want to build a Wordpress powered website, not just to share your thoughts and feelings. And so with content marketing, it really comes down to finding keyword phrases that you can create content around that you have an expertise and understanding that also makes sense for your website, your topical authority and whatever the topic is of your websites. And then that's maybe too competitive. So anyways, let's just jump into my site for a few examples over here. This is a very competitive phrase. Any type of two word thing because like, this is the keyword. I'm going after Blue Host review because this is competitive because there's a lot of people that want to rank for this specific phrase. So you have a lot of competition, so you got to create the best in class content and then get backlinks from more of the websites in order to have a chance at this piece of content ranking. So when you're creating content that's going after something very competitive, it's a long term play. You're gonna need back winks and you're gonna need to wait, wait, wait, wait, wait for the search engines to eventually push up your site. So currently, like, I'm on page four, page four and five for Blue Host review. So I'm not I'm too far back in the search engines to get any real traffic to this piece of content at this time. But again, just keep working on it, keep building links, and eventually your piece of content will rank. It's more effective, though. They're trying to find like, maybe a longer tail phrase. That you can actually get attention for. So, for example, like this, people were actually searching for, like, should I buy my domain name through Shopify? People were literally asking Google that. And so, domain name Shopify, should I buy my domain name at Shopify? Is Shopify good for domain names? Like, that type of phrase. Like, in those long tail keyword phrases, people find this piece of content. And so how to blog first off. Number one, you got to find a keyword that you can actually create content around. Ideally, you want to be going after two types of keywords. So one keyword that is like, short and competitive. So you want to, like, put your hat into the ring, so to speak, for something that's long term, competitive and quite lucrative and over time, build it up via backlinks and constantly updating and making the piece of content better. Then two, you also want to be finding content that you can actually create content around and get results within three months, three to six months, something that's a little bit quicker. So anyways, you need to do that by using a wide range of keyword tools. There's so many out there that's beyond the scope of this course, but one keyword tool that I like, it's a one time fee, which is why I like it is Uber suggests over here. So you can navigate over here. Once you sign up, you can use it for free, but I do suggest creating a paid account. It's not too expensive. And again, it's a one time fee, no subscription or anything. So you begin over here using keyword research, and then you just type in whatever keyword you're thinking of creating content around. So let me click over here for keyword overview, and we'll just type in, I don't know, so domain names, dream host. So, get some ideas around this. So type in, like, a broad, a little keyword over here, and then I'll pop up down here maybe with some additional suggestions. So dream host domain transfer, volume 70, dream host domain names, dream host name servers, dream host name cheap. So like, Oh, okay, like, that's pretty good. For, like, my site, kind of makes sense because I talk about domain names and web hosting and software tools. As it relates to online Internet based businesses. So let's just take a quick look at this. So we have dream host verse name cheap right here. Then just gives us a bunch of additional keywords, shows us the SEO difficulty. CPC is costs per quick. So if I was to run ads and people were to click on my ad and navigate to this page, I'd have to pay $3 per quick, which is quite high. Is name cheap Good. It's name cheap better than Go Daddy. Dream host for square space, all of these keyword phrases. And these are all fairly competitive. So, you want to type is name cheap Good. We'll type that in. Is name cheap, good. And, okay, we have read it right there. We have Cyber News, Digi D Marketing, tech radar. So we have some competitive sites uptop here. So you could rank for this, but it is a little bit difficult. So again, it just takes time trying to figure out those keyword phrases that you can create content around. And then my other suggestions like, once you have success with one format of keyword, then you should just keep expanding with that type of format. So, like, is name cheap good? Is Blue Host good? Is blah, blah, good? You know, you have a success with one? I'm not saying to do that with this specific keyword phrase, but I'm saying if you find a keyword phrase format, that works and you're getting traffic for, then you can just swap out whatever the company software tool, whatever you're talking about, and then just insert another item and just keep going with that. If that makes any sense. And so with blogging content marketing, it really comes down to first, figuring out what keyword phrase you're going to go after. So there's transactional keyword phrases where people are looking to buy something. There's review keywords, and then there's, like, informational keywords as well, where people are just learning how to do something. And you should try and create a wide range of content, and you don't want your website to be overly SEO optimized. That makes sense. So you do want to create content that people just find helpful. So this is about best plugins for Wordpress, best cameras for logging. Get subscribers and grow on YouTube. And this right here, how I went from $10 $10,000 a month with blogging. So this is like, make money with blogging, but I don't want to call it make money with blogging. You don't want to have to over optimize every single piece of content around like super strict keyword phrase. You do want a little bit of creativity and flexibility with your site over here. Let me click on Start. Let me show in, like, another good example. So right over here, for example, how to choose a domain name for a incorporated business. And so it's like this is like, how to name your website. So you want to have a little bit of flexibility and creativity with your content. It's like an 80 20 rule. Like, 80%, you want to be kind of creating content around keyword phrases. 20%, you want to just create content that you make sense for your topic, make sense for your website, but maybe it's not overly optimizing around any specific keyword phrase. So anyways, you need to use a keyword research tool, figure out, like, personally, I don't really care about the volume. As long as there's any volume, that's fine, because when your piece of content is ranking, getting traffic, you'll get a bunch of different long tail keyword phrases for one piece of content. So, if I was actually to create Dream Ho's first Namecheap, I'm not just and I was ranking number one. Yeah, maybe I would get 40 visitors a day for that or maybe a month, whatever. But then I would be getting a bunch of other keyword phrases as well to this piece of content. Alright, so anyways, how do you actually write the piece of content? So blogging is pretty simple. Number one, you need an H one title tag. You need to incorporate your keyword into the title tag as well. And then you need some type of sentence that makes it clickable and catchy. Number two, begin writing your content. Number three, add images that demonstrate what you're talking about. I never add images for decoration purposes. Images are only used to demonstrate what it is you're talking about. Because it's a review post. I have my overall rating, and then I'm using a block over here to star rating that's powered by the jet Back plug in to demonstrate my star rating right there. And then pros and cons is like a double column design or a two column design right there. Again, this by Wordpress and people like Wordpress this is being built out with an inner column right there, two column design with a plugin simple as that. And then the feature image block that I have feature V two, image button. Just more text, sex, text sex text, images, and so forth, then you just build out the best in class content. So you want H one title tag. Then you want to break it up with H two tile tags. That's an H two, that's an H two. This is an H two and so fourth. And then H two because that's a secondary header of this. Okay? So let me click over here and go to the outline. You see this right there. The title is there, H two, H two, H three, H three, H three is a subheading of this H two. Then there's also H four. H four is a subheading of an H three. Also an H five, if you want to go that deep. I never go that deep. I always use the title. I use H two and H three, and I keep it. That is as far as I go with it. There we. And so that's pretty much it. Then you want to incorporate internal and external links, so you want to link to other sites and services and what not externally to help back up the data, whatever it is you're talking about. Link out to other websites is good because it makes your content more trustworthy from search engines. It's weird if you're not linking out to anything. And also within your site, you also want to build in internal links. So on other piece of content, you want to rank back to something that you wrote. Even if it's an older piece of content and, you know, like if I have this BlostRview and I talk about Blue Host in another blog post, link it to this piece of content right there. And that's pretty much it. So you just want to go through it, build out h2h3 title tags, make your piece of content comprehensive, at the very bottom, you want to have a final call to action to do something on every single block Post, whether that's to buy something as an affiliate or your email list or whatever it is. You want to convert your traffic in some meaningful way. So right down here, blah, blah, blah, click on this thing right there, and there you go. Okay, so from a technical standpoint, over here on the left or right hand side, bar, sorry, we have the featured image. So you want to have some type of feature image with your sight, and you want to have it be some type of style that makes sense for your sight, okay? So as you can see, like, all of my thumbnails are kind of the same style with, like, the David Yuki name on it. It's like you want a little bit of brand consistency, but you also want a thumbnail style that's quick and easy to make. Like, these thumbnails, I use Canva. I can whip them up with 5 minutes. I don't really they don't take that long. So you want a specific style that you can quickly make and that matches the brand of your site. So that's just the feature image. Don't spend too much time on that. That's not that important. Then right down here is your URL. So your URL is important. You want to keep your URL nice and tidy. So even though this is called Blue Host review, the Wordpress done for you choice, you want to call it Blue Host Review? Because that's the keyword. Just keep the keyword right there. It doesn't need Blue Host review. The wordpress done for you? No. Delete that. Just keep it strictly to the keyword. Then you want to organize everything into one specific category. So all piece of you can organize into multiple categories if you want. I think it's best to put one block post into one category and then use tags if you want to have multiple tags, which I'll cover separately. And that's really that simple, guys. So you have your slug over here. Simple as that. Then the last thing before you're ready to publish, you want to click over here, I'm using Rank Math, but there's also Yost SEO. Rank Math is an SEO plugin, so let me just show you that briefly. Rink Math SCO. This is my SEO plugin of choice. This is what I use over here. And what this does, it adds its little block right there. Then click over here to edit the Snippet. And then you just want to keep it so it's in the green right there. So this is what's going to be displayed in search engines. So it's nice and tidy, the permalink right there, then your description, keep it nice and tidy. As well, not too long and wordy. And that is it. And once you have that setup, you're good to go. Now, it says over here with the basic SCO, use keyword focus. Personally, I kind of ignore this like, to me, I personally just ignore it. I kind of just write and focus on the keyword, and that's it. If you want to get a little bit more technical, the next thing you could do is use a software tool, like Surfer SEO, because Surfer SEO will analyze your on page SEO and tell you what to improve. Again, you want to pay attention to these details over here, but you don't want to, you know, change your content too much just to fit this in over here with the basic SEO. And otherwise, just go through this, see anything that maybe you could fix and improve like little details here and there, nothing crazy. Anyways, that is how you blog. You first begin with keyword research. You try and find transactional keywords, informational keywords, keywords where you can do a verses, like in comparison or just some type of tutorial or helpful informational piece of content. Try and follow an 80 20 rule where 80% of your contents kind of focused around a keyword. 20%, is just content that you want to write that you find helpful include images, videos, audio, H two, H three title tags, internal, external links. Have a call to action to do something and overall, have an idea of how you're going to convert your traffic in some meaningful way if your piece of content was to rank. 31. Blog Posts Breakdown: What are blogposts. Block posts are just piece of content that are published on your website that are organized into a category. Block post typically have all the same features. They have a featured image like this. So your blog post is displayed with an image when it's part of a blog role, and then to the actual blogpost itself is going to contain a few specific elements. One will be your H one title tag, H one meaning header one, the title of the page, the author, and then any type of category it's put in. Also if you want to have the date as well, you can do that. Over here, you have your text right there, and then you have your H two tile tag, meaning your header two, then this is a header three. So this title right there is a subheading of this, then this one's a subheading of this topic right there. That makes any sense? And then you have images, videos, stylized elements, like bullet points if you want, and then any type of design element to convert traffic in some meaningful way. Because blogging today it's a form of content marketing typically. Now, it wasn't always like that, actually, because back in the day, this is blogger.com from 2004. Over 20 years ago. Blogging back then was sort of like logging today, where people share their thoughts, opinions, share images, and so forth on whatever they want. And their goal wasn't to optimize for any type of search engine. But blogging sort of changed because people noticed that they could publish content on their site, and then they would start getting organic search traffic. And then that opened up different monetization strategies. For example, we have Duce over here. This is one of the first pro bloggers around. Look at that 2001 to 2023. That's crazy, but she has great writing, was able to build an audience, and was able to have display advertising and sell books and make a full time income. And so that's kind of like how blog and change, she's still an old school blogger where she kind of just writes about whatever she wants. That's what people used to do, but now people primarily use blogging as a form of content marketing. For example, the goal of this piece of content is to rank for best cameras for logging because people literally type that in. They type that into AI tools and Google. So I want this piece of content to be recommended. When people are searching for this topic, then people hit this page, and then I try to convert them in a meaningful way by having them click on affiliate links so I can make money. Anyways, that's all that blog posts are today. They're a form of content marketing. You publish content on your site. That content's going to contain text, images, video, audio, and design elements to convert traffic in some meaningful way. 32. Essential Pages You Need : Essential pages for your website. So you do want to add in a few pages, and you have to manually create these pages. They don't just magically appear. So the first page that you want to add in is a privacy policy page. So the privacy policy page should be your website.com slash Privacy or slash Privacy Policy. And the goal of this page is to disclose what information is gathered via your website. So if you're running, analytical software like Google Analytics, that's going to collect data. So you need to disclose that and specifically mentioned that you're not going to share personal information or disclose what information you actually have access to normally, you only have access to an IP address and nothing more. But again, you still need to state that. If you're running an email list, then tell people what you're going to be collecting via the email list and what you're going to be doing with that information. Like, you're not going to be selling that information and so forth. If you are going to be running Google ad since on your website, you are required to state that you have a privacy policy stating that you use Google Start Cookie. And there you go. So privacy policy that's non negotiable. You absolutely need this for your website. Now, over here, we have a terms and conditions page. So the point of a terms and conditions page is to describe to people what they are agreeing to abide by when visiting your website and how to opt out. And typically, they opt out by not visiting the site, leaving and never coming back. It's like inviting people over your house. Just say how you expect them to behave when they're on your website. And for a content site, the key focuses are if your site is copyrighted or not. So if your site is copyrighted, and it usually is by default, unless you say your site is uncopyrighted, like, you got to say what they're allowed to do with your content. So normally, like, for my site, it's fine to link to my site. It's fine to, like, take a bulb of something I wrote and comment on it or quote me or whatever. That's fine. But it's not okay to just rip me off and copy and paste my blog post or anything like that. And also tell users what they are responsible for, what they do, don't do or neglect to do. Next, we have a disclosure page. So this is optional, but it's a good business practice, particularly if you're engaging in affiliate marketing. So the point is to be transparent to your end visitor and make clear any compensation or conflicts of interest that might not otherwise be obvious. So how does your website make money, conflicts of interest. Any types of compensation that you receive. So for example, if you run like a travel blog and you're talking about a specific hotel or something like that, and that hotel paid you to stay there and gave you, like, a free stay, like, you need to disclose things like that. If you receive payment for any products or services that you recommend, you probably want to disclose that as well. Okay, a refund policy. If you're selling products, you need a refund policy. A refund policy, could be part of your terms and conditions page, or you can create a specific refund policy. If you're running like an ecommerce website and a blog, like you're selling a physical product or eBooks or whatever, then you want to create a refund policy. And the refund policy should make things very clear. So what are the time restrictions? Who is responsible for the return shipping? What is the requirement for a return to be accepted? What if something goes wrong? How long does it take to complete a return? When will the consumer get their money back if a return is accepted? These things like that, you need to explain. Then you have a shipping policy. Again, this again more for E commerce, but again, some of you are going to build a blog and ecommerce site, maybe with Woo Commerce, whatever. So the shipping policy should state shipping costs, delivery times, locations, order processing, carriers tracking lost or damaged items. You also want to create about page for your website. So an About page, very simple. An About page should be structured as, like, just quickly established, why does this website exist? What problem are you solving? How are you solving that specific problem? Who's behind this website? Then a final call to action to do something. General, that's how it structure and about page, and have a little bit of personal touch, et cetera, et cetera. And then, like, again, final call to action to do something. Then also, you want to incorporate a contact page. So how can people get in touch with you via social media, email, phone number, that type of thing. So you want to incorporate a contact page into your site as well. 33. What are Pages in WordPress?: What are pages within WordPress? So pages differ from blog posts because they're not organized by categories. Pages are more for static topics like your about page, contact page, resource page, product pages, email, opt in page, thank you page, that type of thing. That's what you use pages for. And that's pretty much it. That's the primary difference. So your About page doesn't make sense to be a blog post, where are you going to organize your About page as a category? That makes no sense. So that's why pages exist within WordPress to be static pages that are not really categorized in any specific category. So let's just take a quick look over here. So I have, like, the About page. This is a page that I created, contact page, the resource page over here. I also went ahead and created a glossary page. Glossary page right here, and there we go. And so this is my website.com slash Glossary. And then all of these links right here are two specific pages. So for example, let's click on Country Code, top level domain name, and it's the page and then the child page. So on the back end of Wordpress with pages, while blog post can be organized in categories, you can organize pages within pages. So they're called child pages. So this is the page right here, Internet Business Glossary, then this is a child page. So country code, top level domain name. Take a look at that over here, and it's just a basic wordpress page, and then writes over here the slug right there, and it's using country code domain name. And then right here, the parents, I chose this page, Internet Business Glossary to be the parent page. And when you do that within WordPress, what it does is it makes this page, a child page of Glossary, and then the changes the world where it's glossary slash Country Code Domain. Quite useful to know because maybe you want to create a bunch of pages around a topic, maybe you want to have it be, I don't know, some type of product or service or whatever. That's how you'd structure that. So it could be like your website.com slash servicelash Service Title. There you go and build up a bunch of different pages. They have services at the top right there, then a drop down, and they all linked to the specific child pages for your specific sales pages for your different services. That's how you want to use pages. They're just for static content that don't make sense to be organized into a specific category, like your about page contact page or I'm doing here with this glossary section thing that I'm building out and so forth. And finally, pages like Black Post, they don't really need a feature image. You can set a feature image if you want, and of course, you can control the SEO clicking over here, SEO for this specific page, and I do recommend doing that. Anyways, that's it for pages within WordPress. 34. Final Thoughts: Alright, everyone. That's it for this fundamentals course on WordPress. You now have all the information you need to build and launch your own WordPress website and understand all the little specific details about how Wordpress works on the back end. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the course and have a great day.