A beginners guide to the WordPress Admin

Easy to follow guide to help beginners familiarise themselves with the WordPress admin and gain confidence creating and editing the content on your website.

We will be covering:

What is WordPress
Login into WordPress
Overview of the WordPress admin
The WordPress Editor

What is WordPress

WordPress is a content management system (CMS), which allows the editing and management of website pages and content. WordPress is used by 63.6% of all websites built on a CMS platform (that equates to around 27+ million live websites), ranking WordPress as the most popular CMS platform.

To access the WordPress admin enter your website address followed by /wp-admin, this generally looks like this https://yourwebsitedomain/wp-admin (Replacing “yourwebsitedomain” with your website address). The first page you will see is the login page. To login in, insert your username (or email address) and supplied password (or if you have received a new user email click on the link provided to create your password).

Overview of the WordPress Overview and Menu

If you’re not used to seeing the WordPress admin, it may look daunting at first, but don’t worry! The WordPress admin is no more complicated than using a simple text editor, and once you have used it a few times, it will soon become second nature.

The WordPress Admin Menu

The left-hand menu displays all the sections you can access to edit or post new content to your WordPress website.

The menu options available will vary depending on the setup of the WordPress website and your user role privileges, but the three main sections are Posts, Media, and Pages.

Posts

Posts are where the blog posts are stored (if your website does not have a blog please skip this). When you click on posts you are presented with 4 options, ‘All Posts’, ‘Add New’, ‘Categories’ and Tags.

Select ‘All Posts’ if you want to view or edit any of your posts. You will be presented with a list of all your posts, to edit a post simply hover your mouse over the post you want and select the ‘edit’ option

To add a new post select the ‘Add New’ button. To make chnages or add new categories or tags select either from the Post sub-menu on the left hand-side.

Media

Here you will find your library of media files (images and pdfs). This section is useful for making changes to your media files such as editing alt tags or deleting images.

Pages

The pages section will most likely be the section you will frequently use when maintaining your website. It stores the main pages for your website, e.g. homepage, about us page, contact us etc. You can also create new pages if you’re expanding the content on the site.

Similarly to posts click Add New to add a new page or to edit an existing page, click “all Pages’ and hover your mouse over the page you want to edit and click the edit button.

Page and Post Hover Menu

Navigate to all pages or all posts and move your mouse cursor over a specific page/post on the list. This will display a small selection of options which relate to the specific post or page.

Edit

Allows you to edit the content on the chosen page/post.

Quick Edit

Allows you to quickly edit certain types of information on the chosen page/post.
Title: Title of the page.
Slug: The URL (link) of the page.
Date: Change the date the page/post was published.
Author: Changes who is attributed to creating the page.
Password: Allows for the page to require a password to access via the front end of the website.
Parent: Change or assign the page to a parent page. For example, you may have an About Us page which is a parent page with the sub-pages which might include ‘Meet the Team’, ‘Our Values’, ‘Accreditations’.
Order: Order of the sub-pages 1 being first.
Template: Only relevant if your site has specific page templates (most do not).
Status: Changes the status of the post/page. Published: Published live on site. Pending Review: Only used if you require permission to post content to site. Draft: Page is not published to site.

Bin

Will delete the page from the published website and place in the trash can.

View

View the page on the front end of the live website.

Clone

This will clone the page, appearing above or below the original post. The position of the cloned page will depend on your username, as the ordering is sorted alphabetically.

New Draft

This will duplicate the content of the chosen page as a new draft page/post, taking you to the edit screen for the duplicated page/post.

WordPress Editor - options and formatting choices

The WordPress Editor

To edit or create a post or page, you will use the WordPress editor . This is accessed when you click ‘edit’ or ‘add new’ within posts or pages. The layout of the editor will be different depending on the build of your site and the layout of each page. To get a good understanding of how the editor is structured for your website pages, I recommend viewing pages in editor whilst also opening an additional browser window/tab with the live website page. By comparing the WordPress editor layout for each page to the live website page, you can easily relate the different sections within the WordPress editor to the reality of your website page.

Making changes in the editor

Making changes to the text and images is straight forward. Firstly click on the text or image you want to change, this will then open in a larger window with a toolbar above. The WordPress toolbar allows you to format text including creating different subheadings, bullet points, alignment of text, add links etc.

Tip. If you are copying and pasting text from an application like Microsoft Word, click on the ‘Paste as text’ icon to paste text without any formatting which can wreck the look of your website page.

Adding Images

To add images press the button labelled ‘Add Image’ or ‘Add Media’. This will then take you a screen where you can upload an image or choose the tab “Media Libary’ to choose an image in the media library.

When uploading images make sure to include an alt tag, the tag is for users with accessibility needs to describe the image shown. Adding a tag can also help enhance your organic search rating.

Saving Changes

Once you have completed your changes or added content to a new page, it is vital to save your changes otherwise, you will lose all the changes you have made.

Editing an existing page

Click the blue ‘Update’ button in the top left section to save the changes.

Creating a new page/post or new duplicated draft

Click the blue ‘Publish’ button in the top left section to publish the changes live to the site.
Click ‘Save Draft’ to save changes without publishing the page live to the website.

A beginners guide to the WordPress Admin

We will be covering:

What is WordPress

Overview of the WordPress Overview and Menu