Know About How to Use WordPress
Welcome to Internet Vibes!
Everything you are looking at right now, build and magically powered by one of the most popular platforms in the Web world – WordPress. Therefore, just saying – welcome to our WordPress blog. Yes, I have been running this blog for some years already, learning, discovering, and implementing some great features, that make this blog enjoyable, functional, SEO optimized, and straightforward to navigate.
And I am not the only one; according to quickrewards.net, seventy-one percent of people within the online world use WordPress because of its ease of use. It means that I have got quite an experience to share with you, if you have been asking yourself or search engines: how to use WordPress? Or wondering: how to make a WordPress blog? Here you go – you’ve decided to run a WordPress blog or to look for your ideas for starting an Internet-based business but have no idea where to start.
Well, if you a beginner and you want to build your website, WordPress is your best option. It’s a powerful Content management system (CMS) that runs almost a third of the Web. However, this leading platform can get intimidating if you are a beginner. It is, however, pretty simple to grasp the rocket science behind WordPress. This article rounds up a brief introduction to help create an excellent WordPress website in about 10 minutes.
It will cover everything from WordPress admin establishment to customization that fits your needs. It’s super-fast! Stick around! In the end, WordPress will not be another vocabulary, but you will understand what it is and how it can be used. If you’re thinking about how to drive target traffic to your new WordPress website, check out established SEO companies like CoolBison who predominantly focus on organic search results from Google.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is an open-source and free Web publishing application, content management system (WordPress CMS), and a blogging tool built to allow users to create dynamic websites and blogs. You don’t need knowledge of coding, and so you can customize every aspect of your site from its back-end CMS and integrated application and components.
There are also many tweaks and small changes that you can do manually if you can tinker around a bit, doing small changes (copy/paste) to the code. These allow you to fix or improve certain features of WordPress. If you’d like to learn more, check out these WordPress tricks from CollectiveRay and try a few of them out.
How it all started
It began as a simple platform by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in 2003, where bloggers could create basic blogs and host them online. Over time, it has grown into a powerful tool for creating different types of sites. WordPress is becoming very popular and powers over one-third of the Web! Many sites are using WordPress, including City Center Bishop Ranch, a luxury shopping center in San Ramon, California.
There is a confusing bit about WordPress, though; WordPress.com and worpress.org. Well, WordPress.com is a web builder for creating and hosting a site for free. On the other hand, wordpress.org is a more powerful tool that remains our focus throughout this guide.
What Makes WordPress Unique?
Firstly, WordPress is a platform that’s subject to a dedicated community of developers and designers that make it better every day. It is again an open-source software. Let me explain. It means that the platform isn’t restricted under copyright or trademark. Therefore, it is freely accessible by anyone to download and modify.
It is not an expensive tool that you will have to take out title loans to be able to afford. This can only be done under the GNU– General Public License, however. That’s why WordPress gets continuous improvement making it a unique platform every time. Isn’t this that news for you as a user? The answer might be “I Don’t Know.” Well, don’t worry. I will tell you additional reasons why it’s still unique.
- WordPress plat from will always be free;
- Many free and low-cost tools are created for use with WordPress (more on this in a moment);
- Its community with a focus designs WordPress to make it more user-friendly with the most necessary features;
- Freedom to choose and modify the software.
Being an open-source platform, WordPress gave rise to an active community of contributors and developers who regularly meet at World Camps worldwide. Consequently, the popularity of WordPress is irresistible, and that’s why there are lots of online forums, blog courses, and resources that help WordPress users decipher it completely.
The majority of people are already familiar and in love with the platform, and that’s why its use spreads like wildfire. Hardly will you get a challenge that a friend or a colleague can’t help out. WordPress comes in handy, not just for beginners. A beautiful aspect of WordPress CMC is that it scales up alongside its users. WordPress becomes more powerful as you learn more about it, and you can use it to create large complex blogs and business websites for online stores. WordPress is indeed a world of endless possibilities.
What Can You Do With WordPress?
Firstly, you can manage your site from the dashboard to one location. You can create and edit posts, comments, and so much more. That is why WordPress, in number one platform for bloggers, is very popular among most popular blogs, sites owners, and somehow known as a website builder for small businesses. As many would think that WordPress is primarily for blogs, the truth is that it can be used to create any site. Such sites include:
- Job Boards: With the growing demand for job boards that cater to a specific industry’s needs, WordPress is ideal for creating such sites. A good example is ProBlogger, Smashing Magazine, among others. Through WordPress, you can easily create a job board where employers and workers meet.
- Online portfolios: With the right WordPress theme, you can showcase your achievements and skills or display your work and past projects.
- Affiliate websites: If you want to create an affiliate marketing website- and you should do- (or monetize your site in some other way), WordPress is your ideal partner.
- Knowledge/ Wiki websites: WordPress comes with great plugins that quickly turn your website into an easy-to-browse knowledgebase wiki.
- News sites: WordPress’s blog format works well for news articles, a feature that makes it fit for blogging and news sites.
- E-commerce stores: WordPress plugins like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and WPEcommerce makes your WordPress website a fully functional e-commerce platform. You can accept payments, shipping, taxes, and users from the same roof.
- Community hubs: You can easily create forums, fan sites, knowledge bases using the lightweight bbPress forum. You can even add social features to a WordPress site with plugins like BuddyPress.
- Business sites: Whether your business is large or small, you can share information, provide contact details, incorporate your branding, and build a strong online presence.
This means that with WordPress, you can always create a website that meets different expectations. My best advice for beginners would be to start small, then scale up over time.
Thankfully, many of the sites listed above are made possible by WordPress themes, plugins, and tools, among other features. I can’t fail to mention the central, user-friendly WordPress dashboard from where an admin can control all aspects of the site from one place.
WordPress Dashboard Overview
The dashboard features a user-friendly and flexible editor that makes content creation a walkover. The designers of WordPress incorporated plenty of settings like SEO, security, and performance elements. Do I talk about the range of themes and plugins to personalize your experience?
How Do You Customize WordPress?
With the WordPress Plugin Directory, you can make use of different tools to customize your site. You can change its looks, and it’s recommendable to use themes and plugins since you’re only a beginner. As you scale up, you will be able to use HTML and CSS comfortably.
Premium WordPress themes
A theme can be downloaded to your site to change the site’s appearance, alter its layout, and bring about some functionality changes. There are general-purpose themes and specific ones, which are specific to the type of websites. However, general themes are usable for matching your own style and branding, where specific themes are perfect for either blog, online stores, portfolios, etc.
Either way, themes usually provide access to many pre-made elements, or you can mix and match to create a unique look, whether or not you’re a designer. https://themeforest.net/ is your number one place to search for your perfect WordPress page template, a Theme that will help you bring to reality any blog or business idea. Almost 43,000 WordPress themes and website templates with prices starting from $2 are created by the major global community of creative minds.
Tools For The WordPress
There are tools out there that can quite improve our WordPress experience. I’m going to tell you a bit about some tools that I recommend you use.
- FileZilla
You will most likely need an FTP program, like FileZilla. The great thing about FileZilla is that it is straightforward to set up and intuitive to use.
- NotePad++
NotePad++ is an open-source, GPL editor and it’s great for editing PHP, CSS, and HTML. It’s also nice and small, which a beginner would most likely find easy to use.
- Xampp
Cross-Platform (X), Apache, PHP, and Perl (XAMPP) is an open-source web server that lets you install a local web server on your computer. You will love using XAMPP with NotePad++ since you can easily edit and save your files using NotePad++ and instantly see the changes appear on your local WordPress installation.
- Jing
Jing is a free screen capture device that you can upload your images to your Jing account directly, and you get a link copied into your clipboard. With Jing, you can quickly take a screenshot and mail it to someone.
- Evernote
With Evernote, you can create notes and add images and other documents to it. It is then stored in your account, which means you can access it from anywhere. You use this free iPhone app to remember ideas you are stuck on a topic.
- Amazon Polly
It is a unique service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing your blog visitors to voice the posts and articles on your website.
Amazon Polly is a Text-to-Speech service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech sounds like a human voice. Plus, it is a huge bonus to your WordPress Voice Search Engine Optimization.
Check, an absolutely new and fascinating Amazon speech recognition option. Well, there are so many other WordPress tools to make your experience easier. The internet is full of them, either from recommendations or from WordPress-focused sites.
10 Most Needed WordPress Plugins
On the other hand, plugins make it possible to bring in additional features and functionality to your site. Some plugins only add only one new feature, such as a contact form or image gallery, or comprehensive options that can make radical changes to your site’s functionality. Some of the tasks you can perform with plugins include:
- Build a storefront;
- Enhance security;
- Optimize your site for search engines;
- Create a forum or wiki, and much more.
Regardless of what you want to do on your site, chances are you will find a plugin that serves that purpose. The internet is explicit with WordPress plugins and themes online. However, being e beginner, I would request that you start with the official Theme Directory and Plugin Directory. Some of the most needed plugins include;
- Yoast SEO. Yoast SEO is the easiest Search Engine Optimization Tool for a WordPress site. Use it to get enough attention. It basically aligns and streamlines your tags across all analytic data platforms–Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter Analytics, etc.
- WP – Backup. This plugin is the best when it comes to the backup of your site. Its best part is that it allows conduct routine backups, so you won’t have to remember to do it independently.
- Editorial Calendar. Use this plugin to organize better and schedule all published content. It gives a give a more efficient content management system.
- WP-Optimize. With WP-Optimize, your site gets cleaned up to keep its performance up to standards.
- WP-Google Analytics Dashboard. This plugin works with a Google Analytics account to display the most relevant analytics– site visitors and click rates. It also makes you able to monitor and compare stats over a period.
- Akismet. This is a plugin that prevents and filters out spam, keeping conversations and comment logs clean. It’s subject to affordable monthly plan pricing options and requires an API key and automatic account registration.
- ShareThis. Use this plugin to allow you to add share buttons for social media accounts on posts and other locations on your site. Its focus is to make it easy for your visitors to easily share your content on their own social media accounts, reaching a broader audience.
- CaptainForm. It’s one of the best plugins for creating WordPress forms such as contact, event registration, donation forms, and more. It’s one of today’s up-to-date, user-friendly forms of the plugin today.
- WP Super Cache. Use this plugin for caching your WordPress site. It’s designed to handle heavy traffic to your site without slowing down the site’s production.
- WP-Touch. This plugin gives you the option to choose mobile-friendly themes to improve the user experience of accessing your site via mobile devices.
50+ Tools For The WordPress Admin
The ones above are the most popular WordPress plugins. But some time ago, Mashable published 50+ more of the most useful, in their opinion, plugins for WordPress. That’s a fact that with time running your WordPress blog can feel like a full-time job. That actually how do I feel every day. Those WordPress Admin plugins are your A-Z list of more than 50 plugins to help you streamline everything you need to do outback. But be aware of installing them all at once!
Adsense WordPress Plugin
An awesome Adsense WordPress plugin is available to get your Adsense earning details within the WordPress admin panel. With the AdSense Earnings WordPress plugin, you can:
- Check your daily earnings in your DashBoard or Options page;
- Check your earnings for a specific period;
- Show the public how many $ you made today.
Link Indication Plugin
Link Indication is a WordPress-compatible plugin that applies CSS class attributes to the links (anchor tags) in your posts, pages, and optionally in your comments. Thereby you can indicate your links, e.g., by images, for characterizing your types of links.
Additionally, you can apply class attributes to special filename extensions, such as .pdf, .xls, .jpg, etc. The plugin is applied at display time, not while a post is being saved. This means that this plugin can be integrated at any time; it will modify the rendering of existing posts and comments as soon as the plugin is enabled. These URLs and filename extensions are fully configurable, and you can add an unlimited number of rules.
Additional options:
- Add the _blank attribute (
target="_blank") to all external links; - Apply this plugin to the entire blog, incl. Header, sidebar, footer;
- Apply the class attributes also to images;
- Do not apply this plugin to comments.
How Should You Get Started With WordPress?
That is why WordPress, in number one platform for bloggers, is very popular among most popular blogs, sites owners, and somehow known as a website builder for small businesses. What should be your WordPress Hosting? It might be your very next and important question. I have a new and unexpected answer – Amazon Lightsail by Amazon AWS. With Amazon Lightsail, you can launch a WordPress site on a virtual private server in the blink of an eye.
All the most popular web hosting services going into the shadow when such an internet giant offers these excellent quality services. Amazon Lightsail hosting plans are designed to make WordPress users successful specifically. You probably are not a cloud expert – no problem at all. Lightsail WordPress virtual private servers are easy to use. To this far, I hope you are convinced that WordPress is well worth trying out. Now what? Here is the process of building a WordPress site.
Building a WordPress site: Pick a Domain Name
Before you do anything, you need to decide on a domain name, the name your site will be stuck with. A domain name needs to be unique, memorable, catchy, and, most importantly – available. You can check to see if your desired domain is available from a domain registrar or a Web hosting company.
https://instantdomainsearch.com/ try this domain finder.
Purchase Hosting
Look for a web host that can offer different solutions as you grow. This means purchasing a hosting plan from many options depending on your particular needs and the kind of site you’re creating. Like I have mentioned before, I would definitely consider Amazon Lightsail hosting.
But there are obviously way more other options to help you out. For instance, if the security of your site is of paramount importance, you might want to consider reaching out to a hosting specialist like Site Ground – there are a lot of reviews online that claim that Site Ground is legit so one of their hosting packages might be the right choice for you. For now, though, let us discover some more hosting options:
- Amazon Lightsail
- Redswitches
- Bluehost
- HostGator Cloud
- SiteGround
- A2 Hosting
- iPage
- Dreamhost
- etc.
Install WP
Let’s imagine now you have a domain and a hosting plan, right? It’s time now to download and install WordPress. You can do this yourself or make use of hosting providers who often offer a one-click installation option.
Choose Themes and Customize with Plugins
At this stage, I’d recommend looking for a quality theme first, then choosing a couple of plugins to add the features you want. With time, you can always choose from a handful of essential plugins that are a smart choice for almost any website. Read above all the information on how and where to find to-go themes and customize plugins.
Start Creating Content
So you’re excited about setting up your blog—time to think about website content strategy. Finally, it would help if you started doing what you set the thing up for; writing, but you better have some super interesting content to go with it. This may seem not very comforting, but that’s alright. One of the best choices you can make to start on the right foot is to choose quality. WordPress opens up am unlimited opportunities for bloggers. But the key is your very own creativity; the sky is the limit.
Be sure WP is running fast and start thing about hiring a WordPress web development team, learn to understand SEO trends. Ensure your site performs well and runs securely as you focus on designing your website.
If you choose the DreamPress Plus or Advanced plans, you’ll also get Jetpack Professional, a comprehensive plugin that provides SEO and security features, for free. Remember, WP is your boat in the ocean of the Web. You should consider and continuously learn a lot of things, all that besides been creative and motivated.
Not only that, but I would also be happy to help you get set up and answer your queries about WordPress and web hosting. You can always count on our WordPress experts who are accessible through various channels, day or night.
Class Dismissed! Hurray!
WordPress’s popularity comes as a result of its wide variety of applications. Whether you a beginner or seasoned developer, you can use it to create small blogs, booming e-commerce sites, and everything around that.
Interestingly, it is shockingly simple to get started. To sum it all, select a domain name and sign up for a hosting plan (i recommend Amazon Lightsail). Then install the platform and start customizing your site. Remember to choose a unique theme and pick out some plugins to add critical features and be healthy!
