In this WordPress tutorial, you will find everything you need to create a website with WordPress. From installation to backups, we’ve got you covered.
Be sure to check out the list of our latest WordPress tutorials at the bottom of this page.
WordPress vio first released on May 27, 2003. The founders are Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little.
WordPress can be referred to as an open source online site building tool based on the PHP and MySQL programming languages. In more advanced terms, it’s called a content management system (CMS).
When WordPress was first released, it had multiple users, but over time it became the largest and most popular CMS in the world. . WordPress is currently powering over 75 million websites.
Research conducted in 2020 shows that this content management system is used by over 26% of the top 10 million ranked sites .
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Why is WordPress so popular?
After discovering With the sheer number of users WordPress has, it might leave you wondering, why is it so popular? Let’s discuss the reasons behind the success of WordPress.
The general point of view is that WordPress is a simple blogging tool, however, it is much more than that.
Due to the fact Since WordPress is a free and open source project, it allows anyone to improve and edit its code to their liking. It also comes with thousands of free plugins, themes, widgets and other tools.
All of these features allow you to create any type of website, from simple blogs, personal websites or portfolios, to e-shops. , knowledge bases or job boards.
Another factor is that WordPress is completely free and supports all hosting platforms with PHP and MySQL. On top of that, this CMS is constantly updated with new versions that improve security, include new features, and improve overall performance.
Last but not least, WordPress has a great community with forums and discussions. dedicated everywhere. The Internet. The amount of data available and thousands of WordPress tutorials also make WordPress one of the easiest to use content management systems out there.
What is a CMS?
A content management system or CMS for short is an application with the ability to create, modify and publish digital content. In most cases, it also supports multiple users, allowing users to work collaboratively.
For example, in WordPress it is possible to create multiple administrative users, each with different privileges. Content management systems also include text and formatting features, the ability to upload videos, photos, audio, maps, or even your own code.
A content management system consists of two main components:
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Other features worth mentioning are:
- SEO -URL friendly
- Online support and communities
- User/group roles
- Various templates and layouts
- Installation Wizards and Upgrades/Upgrades
The three most popular content management systems in the world are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
WordPress.org
WordPress.com and WordPress.org are two ways to host a WordPress site.
What varies with these two methods is the host > actual. Using WordPress.org, you can download the script for free and host it yourself on a local machine or with a hosting provider (like Hostinger).
On the other hand, WordPress.com takes care of everything. that hosting the site for you. You don’t have to manage a web server, pay for hosting, or download software, yet ads are displayed on your site.
Both WordPress.org and WordPress.com have certain advantages and disadvantages.
If you’re not interested in hosting your own or running a web server, then WordPress.com may be the way to go.
It’s free and can be set up quickly. You will also have various features and options for customizing your site.
However, it does have its drawbacks. Your website will include WordPress.com in the URL and you will not be able to upload custom themes or plugins.
The ability to edit or modify the PHP code behind your site will also not be possible.
Using a self-hosted version from WordPress.org gives you more flexibility and control over your site. You will be able to use your own domain name, upload themes, plugins and install them.
This WordPress tutorial will focus on the self-hosted version of WordPress.
Step 1: WordPress Installation
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One of the reasons for the popularity of WordPress is the low requirements system required to run this CMS. on a web server:
- PHP version 5.2.4 or higher.
- MySQL version 5.0.15 or higher or any version of MariaDB.
- Access the Hostinger control panel.
- Locate Auto Installer and open it.
- Enter WordPress in the search field and click its icon.
- Now fill in the website details:
- URL – The URL where WordPress should be installed. If you want to install it on the root domain name (example.com), leave it empty.
- Language: Choose the WordPress language.
- Admin Username – Your WordPress admin username. You will use it to access the WordPress admin area.
- Admin Password – Your WordPress admin password. You will use it to access the WordPress admin area.
- Admin Email – Enter your email address.
- Site Title web – The title of your WordPress website.
- Website Tagline – A short sentence or tagline that explains what your website is about.
- Press Install button.
- FTP client or file manager
- Latest version of WordPress
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You would be hard pressed to find a hosting provider that is not compatible with WordPress. Additionally, many hosts use multiple auto-installers to make the WordPress installation process as simple as possible.
By using auto-installers, users no longer have to deal with creating databases or loading files. files.
In this part of our WordPress tutorial, you will learn two different ways to install WordPress.
Option 1.1: Install WordPress on Hostinger using the automatic installer
Let’s start with the easiest and fastest way to install WordPress: Hostinger’s auto-installer. The steps below show how to install WordPress in the Hostinger control panel:
Option 1.2 – Install WordPress manually
If you want to understand the basics and learn how WordPress works, you can install it manually. WordPress is famous for its 5-minute installer.
The process is simple and similar to installing any other software. So, if you’ve ever installed any computer programs, it won’t be difficult for you to complete the WordPress installation.
What you need before proceeding:
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First, download the latest version of WordPress from the official WordPress.org website.
Once the download is complete, you can start uploading WordPress files to your hosting account. You can use a file manager provided by your hosting provider or an FTP client.
There is no difference in the tool you will use to upload WordPress files, other than ease of use. The only thing to consider is the destination directory.
For example, if you want to have WordPress on a root domain name, the files should be uploaded to the public_html folder. If you want to serve WordPress from a subdomain name or subfolder, upload the files to the appropriate directory.
WordPress stores information in the database. Therefore, it is mandatory to create one. On Hostinger, a new database can be created in the MySQL Databases section. Be sure to write down the database details, as you will need them later.
Now visit your domain name to begin the installation process. You will be prompted to fill in MySQL database information, administrator details, and site information.
Step 2 – Navigate to WordPress Dashboard
Once the installation is complete, the first thing you’ll want to do is log into your WordPress admin panel.
There’s usually a link to the login page at the front of the WordPress blog. However, some themes do not have this link. In this case, the easiest way to log in to WordPress is to add wp-admin to the end of your website address like this:
- http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
This URL will direct you to the login screen where you will be asked to enter the username and the administrator password. Remember, you have entered these details during WordPress installation. If you have forgotten your password, click the Lost your password? link.
After logging in, you will see the administrator panel. It is designed to give you an overview of your entire website and contains 3 main sections:
- A toolbar at the top of the page. Contains links to the most commonly used administrative functions and resources. For example, if you hover over your website name, you’ll get a link to the public view of your site. It also shows simple notifications like updates and new comment counts.
- The main navigation menu on the left side. Contains links to all WordPress admin screens. If you hover over a menu item, a submenu with additional items will be displayed.
- The main work area.
The first time you log in to the Your WordPress administrator will see a welcome module that contains some useful links to help you get started.
Once you feel comfortable with the panel, press the Dismiss button to hide this. module.
Other modules:
- At a glance table will tell you how many posts, pages and comments you have. It also shows the version of WordPress and the theme you’re running.
- The Activity box gives you a little more information about your latest posts and comments. Shows the status of all comments and a short list of the most recent comments.
- Fast Draft. Entering content into this box will start a new blog post. However, you can’t post one from here, as this box is only for grabbing ideas from blog posts so you can come back to them later.
- WordPress News. This module displays the latest WordPress news.
Each of these windows has little arrows that you can use to quickly hide the box. You can also drag and drop them into different positions.
Step 3: Publish Content
Building a WordPress website starts with publishing a new post or a new page. You may be wondering: what is the difference between posts and pages?
The answer is simple. WordPress posts can be categorized, tagged, and archived. WordPress posts are used to publish time-sensitive content.
In contrast, pages are primarily for static and undated content. They have no categories or tags. Contact Us or About pages are good page examples.
Step 3.1: Create a New Post
To create a new WordPress post, open Add the New section under Posts or select the New -> Post option on the top toolbar. p>
You will be presented with an editing screen with a number of publishing functions. The first thing you need to do is enter a title for your post.
Secondly, enter the actual content of your post in the field below. If you want to format your text, use the options on the toolbar.
This is similar to what you can find in MS Word or any other popular text editor.
On the right side of the screen, you can see the so-called meta-boxes. Each box has a particular function.
- Publish. Here you can change the status and visibility of your post, schedule it. By clicking the Publish button, your post will be published. If you decide to delete the post, press the Move to Trash button.
- Categories. In this box, you can add, delete, or edit the category of your post.
- Tags The box allows you to quickly add new tags.
- Image featured. Here you can assign a featured image to a post. It will be visible at the top of the post (image placement may be different depending on the theme).
Step 3.2: Creating a new page
To create a new WordPress page, open the Add New section in the Pages menu or click New – > Page in the top toolbar.
Add New page section has an identical WYSIWYG text editor as the section has. Publications. Therefore, the process of text entry and formatting is the same.
You may also notice that the Pages section does not have Tags and Categories meta -boxes. . Instead, you have a box called Page Attributes.
In this section, you can change the order of your pages and set parent pages. This is useful if you want to have multiple pages on one main page.
Step 4 – Installing WordPress Plugins
The main purpose of WordPress plugins is to extend the functionality of WordPress. Just by installing and activating a plugin, you can add new features to your WordPress site without coding.
There are thousands of free and paid plugins built for different purposes: from social sharing to security. Therefore, you will surely find a plugin that suits your needs.
Installing WordPress plugins is an easy task even for a beginner. Free and freemium plugins are available from the WordPress.org plugin directory.
Like themes, these can be installed using the built-in WordPress installer.
To install a WordPress plugin, press the Add New button under Plugins and enter the name of the plugin you want to install in the search field. Press Install and then the Activate button.
There are thousands of premium (paid) WordPress plugins that cannot be installed from the official WordPress plugin directory. If you purchased a premium plugin, you would have to manually upload it to WordPress.
The process is quite similar to installing themes. To continue, press the Add New button under Plugins and press Upload Plugin. Now select a plugin file and upload it. Finally, install and activate the plugin.
Essential WordPress Plugins
There are so many WordPress plugins that it might be hard to choose the right one. In fact, many of the plugins serve the same purpose, for example, there are dozens of WordPress caching plugins.
That’s why we decided to list the best WordPress plugins that are essential for every blog. from WordPress.
- Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin will automatically generate XML sitemaps for better search engine optimization. It’s easy to use and update regularly.
- Yoast SEO. Probably the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. It will help you improve search engine optimization. From meta tags to writing suggestions, the Yoast SEO plugin has it all.
- Wordfence Security. This plugin will keep your WordPress safe from hackers and malware. It has firewall and malware scanner modules that are super useful.
- Contact Form 7. Simple yet very powerful WordPress contact form plugin. Create any contact or even lead gen forms with this plugin.
Step 5 – Installing WordPress Themes
The look of the WordPress site can be changed by applying themes. There are free and premium WordPress themes. Some of them are universal and can be used on any website. Others are built for a very specific purpose, for example eCommerce themes.
WordPress made theme installation very easy. It literally takes just a few minutes to install free WordPress themes.
To continue, head over to the Appearance section and browse for some cool free WordPress themes. You can even filter themes by features or colors.
The theme preview feature allows you to see how your website will look with a selected theme. This is useful as it will save you time – you won’t have to install multiple themes just to find the theme that suits your needs.
The above method is suitable for free and freemium themes only. What if you bought an attractive premium theme? In this case, you will have to upload the theme files manually.
Access the same Appearance section, press the Upload theme button and select the theme .zip file. The upload process may take a few minutes to complete. Once this is done, simply Activate the theme.
Step 6 – Optimizing WordPress Performance
In this tutorial on WordPress, we have now learned how to install and use WordPress to create and manage your own website. As your WordPress site grows, so does the amount of text, images, code, and other media files.
A larger website means it will take longer to load. To avoid slow response time in WordPress, you should also invest some time in optimization.
It will ensure that your pages load quickly and efficiently, leaving your visitors happy and eager to come back for more.
Everyone has encountered a slow website at least a few times and felt the frustration that comes from endlessly waiting for it to load.
Having That in mind, spend some time improving your WordPress speed is a very good idea. The best part of WordPress is that it is really easy to optimize due to the number of plugins and other tools available.
You can make your WordPress site lightning fast without even having any knowledge of coding. To get you on the right track, we’ll cover some WordPress optimization techniques that will provide a noticeable boost to your website speed.
Step 6.1 – Using WordPress Caching Plugins
The first step in optimizing your WordPress site is to set up a WordPress caching plugin. In short, a cache is a temporary data storage. In most cases, active data is cached, which reduces loading times.
For example, when you access a frequently visited site, your browser will have some static content of the site located in its cache.
As a result, the browser needs to request fewer files and information from the server, which ultimately leads to faster loading.
Plugins WordPress caching work by creating a static version of your website and serving instead of loading all the PHP scripts every time someone updates or re-enters your site.
The most popular WordPress caching plugins are:
- WP Super Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Fastest Cache
You can find a detailed guide on how to implement caching for your WordPress website.
Step 6.2 – WordPress Image Optimization
Image optimization is another crucial task that needs to be done to make your WordPress site fast. Generally, there are 2 main issues that cause images to load slowly:
- Using images that are too large. For example, you upload an image with dimensions of 500 x 500, but your site resizes it to 100 x 100. As a result, the visitor’s browser will have to download the largest file first, reduce it, and then display it. The correct way would be to simply upload an image of 100 x 100 dimensions to avoid the excessive task of reducing the image. The image would also take up less space that way, resulting in an overall speed increase. To make things easier, we prepared a detailed guide on how to improve website performance with upscaled images.
- Images are not fully compressed. You can save a lot of space and bandwidth if it correctly compresses your images. Fortunately, WordPress has a really nice plugin that can help you with that. Read how to implement this WordPress image optimization plugin and optimize your WordPress images.
The more images your WordPress site has, the more beneficial this optimization task will be.
Step 6.3: Enabling gzip compression for WordPress
Enabling gzip compression for a WordPress website is a great way to increase speed and performance. In short, gzip compression works by finding similar strings in a text file and temporarily replacing them, resulting in a smaller file size.
HTML and CSS files have a lot of repetitive text and spaces, which makes gzip compression very efficient. In general, you can reduce the size of a WordPress page by up to 50-70%.
There are a few ways to enable gzip compression:
- Enable gzip compression to via the .htaccess file (recommended). A more detailed WordPress tutorial can be found here.
- Enable gzip compression through WordPress plugins, such as GZip Ninja Speed.
One thing to keep in mind Note is that gzip compression may slightly increase CPU usage. If CPU isn’t an issue, then gzip compression is a great way to optimize your WordPress site.
Step 6.4 – Defer Parsing JavaScript in WordPress
Most social media plugins, plugins and themes use a lot of JavaScript which, by default, is loaded first when accessing a site. This will cause the HTML and other visual content to appear only after the JS is loaded.
You can defer JavaScript parsing so that the visual elements appear faster, while various social media buttons and other content that uses JavaScript to load afterwards.
This is one of the techniques recommended by the Speed Booster Pack. See our more detailed tutorial on deferring JavaScript parsing in WordPress.
Step 6.5 – Using a content delivery network
Deploying a Content Delivery Network (CDN for short) will speed up WordPress by caching content in multiple data centers around the world.
After a visitor enters your site, the content will be delivered by the center closest available data source, which will result in a better front-end experience.
CDNs also work great with WordPress caching plugins and there are free solutions to get you started. For example, CloudFlare has a free plan that provides the benefits of a CDN while protecting your site from DDoS attacks.
Step 6.6: Removing query strings from static resources
GTMetrix and other optimization tools suggest removing query strings from CSS and JS to improve caching of those elements.
Read our article on removing query strings for static fonts.
Step 6.7: Enable Lazy Loading
Usually when a web page is opened, all content is loaded instantly, which is called anxious load . Alternatively, it is possible to delay the initialization of some objects (such as images) until they are needed, called lazy loading.
The most common practice is to only display images when they are visible from the visitor’s point of view or on the screen.
All you need to do to take advantage of this technique is install and enable a plugin like Rocket Lazy Load.
Step 7: Maintain WordPress Security
Last but not least, in order to have a successful WordPress site, you need to strengthen your security. Just as WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, it also happens to be the most hacked.
However, there are quite a few things you can do to protect your site from hacking and other malicious activity.
Step 7.1: Keep WordPress Up to Date
One of the most important factors in having a secure environment is to always update and use the latest version of WordPress. themes and plugins.
Most updates include security tweaks, vulnerability fixes, and prevent them from being exploitable in future versions.
A common practice among hackers is to take advantage of Web pages that are running an outdated version of WordPress with a known vulnerability.
By default, WordPress is automatically updated when a new version is released; however, it may not always work or the feature may be disabled on some hosts.
Usually when a new version of WordPress arrives, a notification will be displayed at the top of your Dashboard. You can also update your themes and plugins via the Dashboard -> Updates section.
Step 7.2 – Using Unique Usernames and Passwords
Administrator is the default username on all WordPress installations. It is highly recommended to change it as it will add an extra layer of security to your login credentials.
Imagine a situation where someone knows your password, however they don’t know the username.
The end result is that the person still won’t be able to access your dashboard because they don’t know the username. Leaving the value as admin can make the hacker’s job much easier, so it should always be changed.
When setting a password, be sure to include numbers, letters upper case and lower case. special symbols. In case you have a hard time keeping track of all your passwords, you can store them using tools like Last Pass.
It will save you the hassle of remembering all the different passwords and will allow you to go crazy on the difficulty with the password.
Step 7.3 – Backup WordPress
Backing up WordPress is a crucial task for any website. Not only will it increase your security, but it will also give you a reliable way to restore your site in the event of errors or unexpected problems.
You can either perform a backup manually or use strong>automation. The manual process would involve downloading the files and MySQL database from a WordPress site.
However, if you make a lot of new posts, changes, or manage several different websites, downloading everything manually every time can be a real hassle.
Also, most hosting providers these days offer automatic account backups. As an added security measure, you can use WordPress plugins to automate monthly, weekly or even daily backups.
They will save you a lot of time and also give you the option of store the backup WordPress files and database in a remote location like DropBox. You can use plugins like:
- UpdraftPlus is a plugin with the ability to backup and restore WordPress to a remote location.
- BackUpWordPress is a lightweight backup plugin with automation. It allows you to exclude certain folders, schedule the runtime, and has support for several different languages.
Latest WordPress Tutorials
In In this WordPress Tutorial, we have learned about the history, the structure of this CMS and the types of WordPress hosting. Two installation methods were covered with a brief tour of dashboard, post, plugin, and theme management.
To get a good head start, we’ve also gone over WordPress speed and optimization techniques more crucial with some security measures. tips. If you want to continue learning about WordPress, check out the list of our most recent WordPress tutorials below.
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