WordPress Tutorial for Beginners 2020 - How to Create Your First WordPress Website

Key Takeaways

welcome to my wordpress tutorial so in the very first minute of this tutorial it'll it's just gonna show these timestamps so if you're looking for something specific if you already have wordpress installed I start going through actual using WordPress about 20 minutes into this video so in the beginning I start by going through hosting and then I show you how to install WordPress and then I show you how to login and apply any updates that you might need to to your wordpress blog and then some of the different things I cover include plugins creating blog posts handling your categories and your tags installing new WordPress themes customizing your WordPress theme adding widgets creating menus and then any theme options you need to go over and then I kind of go through each of the individual tabs in WordPress so you can learn how to use this platform I did my best to cover WordPress in about an hour and a half so if you're just getting started there should be a good high level overview of how to use WordPress so now let's get started with this video and my wordpress tutorial what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC youtube channel today is gonna be my wordpress tutorial for beginners so it's gonna be a video geared towards people who are just getting started with WordPress for the first time and I'm gonna go through the entire process of getting web hosting setting up your first WordPress website and then every little detail of the platform that you need to know about especially as you get started if you're very familiar with WordPress if you're already managing a website or multiple websites or you've been working with WordPress for even several months this is probably not the video for you but if you feel like you're stuck if you're not sure how to get started with WordPress and this is probably gonna be a good video for you so the first thing you need to do to get started with WordPress is you need web hosting and you can find web hosting there's a variety of hosting providers if you do a quick Google search you'll find 10 20 30 different hosting providers and they all allow you to host your WordPress website so it's the main thing you need to do because you're gonna need some server space to host your website to handle the traffic that's going to your website and the main one that I use is Bluehost and the other one that I use is Hostgator so these are two web hosting companies that I highly recommend just based on their pricing based on their customer service and based on the overall performance that you're going to get from both of them for this example I'm going to be using Bluehost my websites are all hosted there Bluehost except for one of them is hosted through Hostgator so I'm eventually gonna move that one over to Bluehost so just know if you do choose a specific web host you can always move your website I've worked with a lot of web hosts in the past and you can easily move your website from one web host to another so what I'm gonna do to get started with Bluehost is show you some of the different hosting plans you can choose from and the first one I want to go through is their WordPress hosting so if you come in here and you go to their WordPress hosting you're gonna see three different plan options build grow and scale I'm not gonna be using these for this specific video I'll go through these in a follow-up video but these are some different ways that you can build a WordPress website but it's gonna be a little bit more expensive than choosing a shared hosting plan now if we come over here back to this main page and you come to hosting or gonna see three different options here shared hosting so this is the most basic form of hosting you're sharing a server with other websites virtual private server hosting so with this one you're still sharing a server with other web sites but you're getting a larger piece of that server so it's gonna allow your website to perform a little bit better than shared hosting and then last but not least is dedicated hosting so for my web sites beach-front two core command farmhouse goals com they're both using dedicated hosting plans because it allows my website to handle traffic avoid downtime and I can work on my website without having really any issues with my website freezing or having any downtime so it's the most expensive is gonna be dedicated hosting and if we just come over here to web hosting we're gonna see shared hosting plans here start at 275 per month now they're that cheap if you choose to select a three-year plan a lot of people probably don't want to start with a three-year plan VPS hosting starts at eighteen ninety-nine a month again that's it for a three year plan and dedicated hosting same exact thing but this one starts at seventy nine ninety nine per month now if you're just getting started with your first website you can just use a shared web hosting plan you shouldn't have any issues so if we click here unselect for a shared web hosting plan you're gonna see there's some different options down here basic plus choice plus and pro and you're gonna see some of these different things that you have here so with basic you only get 50 gigabytes of solid-state drive storage you get unmetered bandwidth free SSL certificate want to include a domain five Park domains but with basic you only get one website what I would recommend doing is going with plus or choice plus as you get started so I'm just gonna choose choice plus since it's the same price as plus here and what we're gonna do is click on select here now the next thing you can do is set up your domain if you already have a domain that you own you can enter it here so if you've already purchased a domain you want to enter it right here otherwise we can create a new domain right here otherwise what you can do is skip this step and create a domain later I'm gonna create a domain a new domain for this example so for this one I'm gonna do Surfside digital marketing comm and we're gonna click on next okay so when you enter a domain and it's available it's gonna come up right here the domain Surfside digital marketing comm is available if it's already taken or if it's a premium domain you might have to select a different domain you can purchase premium domains they have some different domains for sale upwards of 1000 $10,000 I generally don't go for premium domains I just try to find the domain that works the best for the business that I'm trying to build or the website I'm trying to build you want your domain to be unique and descriptive so a couple of mine are beachfront decor calm farmhouse Kohl's calm and then Surfside PPC calm so I'll just choose something that you think fits the best for the type of website that you're creating now as we set up our hosting account we're gonna have to tear all this account information but the main thing I want to go through here is the package information you're gonna see a count plan so for this one for 36 months so for 3 years it's 178 dollars and 20 cents now to put that in perspective I have a dedicated web hosting plan for beachfront decor and that one cost me about eighteen hundred dollars per year so if you're using a better web hosting plan it's gonna cost you more money you can also come over here and just do a twelve month price so that's gonna be six dollars and seventy five cents per month 481 dollars total so this is where you could start with yours here you're just spending eighty one dollars here as we come down you're gonna see they're gonna have some package extras domain privacy and protection for free site lock security so this one you don't have to do it and if you take it away it's just gonna be 81 dollars here and then you come down to payment information and you're gonna have to pay your total here and that's gonna give you hosting for one year with your WordPress website you can also come over here and choose a dedicated hosting plan so if I open up the dedicated option here and down you're gonna see one month price for the basic dedicated plan is $149 if you choose the 36 month price that one's gonna cost about $3,000 then you have hosting for three years so you're spending a thousand dollars a year about on hosting now the other one over here is a VPS standard web hosting plan one month price $29.99 thirty-six month price eighteen ninety-nine that one's gonna be for three years eight hundred fifteen dollars so hosting is really gonna depend on what your website needs and how many how much resources you need for your website if you start with a shared web hosting plan you spend eighty one dollars here and after several months it's not able to handle your needs then what you can do is always improve your hosting over time so you can always come over here and upgrade to a VPS hosting plan and just pay the difference for this example I'm just gonna do choose VPS standard web host in one month so $29.99 and I'm not gonna be doing site lock security or code guard basic so it's gonna cost me $29.99 here and now I'm gonna do is go through this process of setting up my account and enter my payment information and I'm gonna click on submit here okay so now it's showing your purchase was a success here we sent a confirmation email to my email so next thing we need to do is create our account so we're gonna click on create account here now the domain name we set up as we went through the process was Surfside digital marketing comm so this is gonna be the domain name that we're gonna be using as we set up our WordPress website and I'm gonna create a password here and retype okay so next we're gonna set up our password and click on create account okay so our account is ready to go now now we can log in so we're gonna go to log in and you're gonna have to re-type your password in so they're gonna have our domain name here and then we're gonna have our password to type in again okay so now we have our hosting plan you can see up in the top right corner we have a VPS hosting plan it's just a one month plan so the way this is gonna work its gonna charge us each and every month that $29.99 dollar fee so as we scroll down here the first thing we want to do is install WordPress so after you log in you're gonna see something that looks like this it's your hosting home page you can come in here to cPanel so if we click on cPanel it's gonna show you this hosting services that you have if we keep scrolling down and we'll have your main domain down here email your website so these are gonna be a lot of different options in cPanel you might never use a lot of these different things and if you're not familiar with cPanel it's something you're gonna have to learn a little bit over time but really you don't need to know a ton of different things here your domain will be managed right here in domain manager if you need to transfer it you can do that here if you want to register a new domain name you can do that as well file manager will allow you to access all of your files but what I want to show you now is regardless of the hosting plan that you choose when you do come in the backend here you're gonna see this cPanel here so when you come here this is a Bluehost example and you see website here you can click on install WordPress right here one-click install both of those will allow you to easily install WordPress on any domain that you already own now to take you in the back end of Hostgator just to show you another example so this is the Hostgator control panel you can see here they have WordPress installer here so when you click on those it's 100% free you go through you can install WordPress on any website that you have so if you have a domain name in your hosting account so if you come here and let's just say we scroll down we have domain manager even if we register a brand new domain once we have it in our hosting account and we're managing it here all you need to do is come over and click on install WordPress and you can easily n free install WordPress on any of the domains that you own now what I want to show you is the manual method to install WordPress because it's a very simple process and it's something that can be useful and something you can continue to use in the future if you ever need to install WordPress so again you can just come here click on install WordPress if you're using Hostgator if you're using any different hosting provider just come here to the WordPress installer they all have it because it's such a huge platform and so many people are using it so website hosts have it set up so that people can easily install WordPress regardless of the domain that they want to install it on ok so now what we want to do is we want to make sure we're in our cPanel for our hosting account here and once you're here you can open up this page I will put this page in the video description it's how to install WordPress if you do a quick Google search how to install WordPress this will be the top result so once you have a hosting account once you have your domain ready you can install WordPress for free so we're gonna do is we're gonna come here you're gonna see basic instructions and over on the right-hand side it's a 5 step process right here so step 1 is downloaded extracts so you download WordPress to your computer you extract the files next you create a database in a user using phpMyAdmin I'll show you how to do that you set up your WP config file I'll show you how to do that as well you upload the files in the root directory or in a subdirectory and then you run the install script so I'm going to show you how to do that using this step-by-step process here so we're gonna come down and we're gonna start with step 1 download and extract so you come here to wordpress.org slash download so we'll come here we'll open it in a new tab and now it's gonna show the latest version of WordPress here no matter what so you can see priceless and also free so you need hosting account to host your website but you can install WordPress completely free on any web host that you're using ok so once we've downloaded the zip file what we want to do is extract it so we're gonna take it right here I'm gonna right click on it and click on extract all and we're just gonna extract it in the same exact folder ok so we have it extracted here so we're gonna open this folder so these are gonna be our WordPress files so when you open that folder you're gonna see another folder named WordPress so we're gonna take this folder and open it again and now what I want to do is take all of these files here so we're gonna start from WP admin come all the way down here to xml-rpc dot PHP so we're gonna take all these files right here we're gonna right-click and we're gonna send these to a compressed zip folder so we want to take the folder inside of our zip folder and take all these files here and send them to their own zip folder here so you can see it's just named WP load right here so we can rename it if we want and we'll just do WordPress files ok you don't have to rename it but we'll just do it to make it a little bit easier to see so now what we want to do is we want to come back over to cPanel so we have our WordPress files all downloaded we want to come back over to CP and we're gonna scroll down here now you can either upload these using FTP if you're using cPanel you can just use file manager right here so we're gonna open our file manager ok in the directory that we want to open here is public HTML so we're just gonna open this folder right here so now we're in the folder for our website is public HTML if you have multiple websites here what you might see for example is let's just say I have surface ID PBC com on this server as well what you might see is a folder that just says so side PPC comm so if I create this new folder here you might see another folder like this if you have multiple domains but what you need to understand is that this is going to be a separate domain that's on your server and everything that's in this public HTML file is gonna be for the main domain here so mine is gonna be for surf side digital marketing comm so that's the main domain on my account so when I come in here to public HTML this folder has all the files for my website so I'm gonna take this one right here and we're just gonna delete it okay so we'll delete that now so now the one file here for surf side digital marketing comm is this CGI bin folder so what we want to do next is click on upload and the file we want to upload is that zip file we just created in our WordPress folders we're gonna click on select file here and the one we want to upload here is this WordPress files this compressed zipped folder that's holding all of these different files in this one folder so we're gonna upload this one now okay our uploads complete we can come back home to our public HTML page and you're gonna see WordPress files dot zip right here now what we want to do is click on this zip file right here and click on extract so it might look a little bit different depending on the host you use but every single host that has a file manager it's always looks something like this so now you've extracted all these files if we click on close you're gonna see now in our public HTML folder we have all these files here now we can take this zip folder that we just uploaded and we can delete it so now we're gonna delete this file right here and click on confirm so now we're not completely done yet we still have to do a few more steps so the next thing we're going to do is come back over to cPanel and what we wanted to do next is create the database for our website so when you're using WordPress you need a database for your website and you need a database user for your website so every time you have a new post it's all gonna be hosted in that database so that's the whole point of having a server is because you're gonna have a database with all of your website files any images anything like that is why you have a server for your website that's gonna be able to host your WordPress website so we're gonna scroll down here a little bit and what you're gonna be looking for here under database tools is my sequel databases so we're gonna take this page right here and we're gonna open it ok so when we come in here since we have a brand new hosting account you're gonna see there are no databases associated with your account and we have no users associated with our account either so we're gonna come over here and create a new database okay you can name it anything you want to I can do Surfside digital marketing you're gonna have a limit on characters so for this one I'll just do website DB website database so it really doesn't matter it's gonna use this initial part here and then it's gonna have our database name right here we're gonna click on create database okay so we've added the database here we're gonna go back okay so what you're gonna see is we have our new database created now we need to do is create a user so what we're gonna do is we'll just come in here and we'll just you user so now we have our username created we need to enter a password okay so we have our user here we have our password you need to remember this password here it's gonna be really important in the next step so the next thing we want to do is create this user okay so you can see we have our database created here next we have our user created here so our current user so what we want to do is add this user the user we just created to our database when we want to click on add and now we need to set our user privileges and what we want to do is all privileges so we're creating a user that can access this database with all privileges and we're gonna come down here and click on make changes okay it's gonna say success you save this users privileges on this database we're gonna go back and we're gonna stay here in this page for right now okay so we never closed file manager before so we still have file manager open for our website you can see public HTML and you can see all of our files here so what we want to do here is there's gonna be this right here wp-config-sample.php so what we want to do is click on this and we're gonna click on edit okay we're gonna click on edit again right here okay so now what you're gonna see is this is gonna be the file that's gonna allow us to enter our database name our database user that we just set up in the previous step and then our database password so this is why I said you have to remember your password here because you're gonna have to retype it in this part so the first thing you want to do is DB name database name here so we're gonna take this we're gonna get rid of it and we're gonna come back over here and our database name is right here so we're gonna copy this we're gonna come back over to this file and we're gonna paste it okay so the next is gonna be username so we're going to come over here we're gonna come down to our username we're gonna copy it come over here and we're gonna do the same thing here so database user we enter that here we have our database name our database user now the next thing we need to do is enter our password here so I'm gonna enter my password and I'm gonna click on Save Changes okay so I entered my password and I clicked on save I just reinterred password here but I'm not gonna save this file again so once you have your database name database user here and the database password that you set up for your user when you set it up in the previous step you can click on Save Changes and you can close this file okay so now we're gonna be back into our public HTML folder here so what we want to do is we want to rename this file instead of wp-config-sample.php config so we're gonna come over here click on rename and get rid of the hyphen and the sample so it's just gonna be WP config dot PHP click on rename file so now you don't want it to say sample here because the way wordpress works it calls all these files in different scenarios so it's going to call this file when it wants to access our database so now we have that all set up so now coming back over here to how to install WordPress step one we download it and extract it WordPress and then we uploaded those files to our server step two we created the database and the user and we use that using the my sequel databases pages now what you can see here is if you're using a hosting account you're gonna see some of these different options here cPanel server email website FTP databases so if you're not sure how to find any of these pages just come to databases here you can always search from your cPanel for some of these different pages that you're looking for and they're all gonna look somewhat similar so if we come over here to Hostgator you're gonna see my sequel databases right here so it's gonna be the same exact process if you're using this with Hostgator or Bluehost or really any hosting provider you can see file manager right here so if you go into your file manager you can always upload your files that way you can also upload using FTP it's a little bit more advanced so I like to just use file manager you're just kind of working in your back-end here for your hosting account and it's good to kind of learn all of this because the more you use WordPress the more you're gonna have to use some of these different things in your hosting account so we're gonna come back over here to cPanel and we're gonna come to the main page now we should be ready to install WordPress here so what we're gonna do is if we come back over here to how to install WordPress we're on to step 5 so if we come up here to step four it's gonna say upload the files so we already did that if we come back up here it's going to show us how to set up our wp-config.php file we already did that as well so we're gonna come down here we're on to step 5 and what we're gonna do is we're going to take this right here so we're gonna copy it and we're gonna paste it into a new page we're gonna change example.com to our own website so I'm gonna do Surfside digital marketing comm slash wp-admin slash install dot PHP so this is gonna be the page here and we're gonna click on enter ok so you should see something like this the next thing you want to do is set up your language so I'm gonna choose English here and click on continue and now it's gonna say information needed site title so we're gonna do Surfside digital marketing use your name so our username I'll just enter Corey hey so the next thing you want to do is enter your password here so I just entered my password I can confirm use its gonna say a weak password I don't think my password is too weak but WordPress does have some pretty strict standards with passwords next is gonna be my email okay and then it's gonna say search engine visibility discourage search engines from indexing this site we're not gonna select this so this is all we need to do our site title enter our username enter our password again you want to make sure you remember this password confirm the use of the password here enter our email and then we're gonna install WordPress ok so you're gonna see success here WordPress has installed thank you and enjoy so now we can click on login you want to enter your user name and password again here so enter my username enter my password I can do remember me and we're gonna do login ok so now we're ready to use WordPress so this is what WordPress looks like I want to zoom this a little bit just so it's a little bit larger but you can see this is our dashboard here any updates that you have for any of the plugins you have installed are gonna show here so if we click on updates here it's gonna show this plug-in to be updated so a good first lesson anytime you have plugins that need to be updated its gonna show right here there's ways to automate this process I'll go through that later in the video but if you do see an update here you want to keep all your plugins up-to-date because old plugins can be security risks for your website so we click here select all and we're gonna update plugins ok so it's that simple to update plugins once you do have all of your updates completed this is what your updates page is gonna look like so it's gonna say you have the latest version of press your plugins are all up to date and your themes are all up to date as well now when there is a new version of WordPress you don't need to install it the way and saw that earlier in the video all you need to do is check your updates page here and we'll show up right here once they have the new version of WordPress out you can easily just update it directly through WordPress so it makes it really easy to update your any version of WordPress that you're using any plugins that you're using and any themes that you're using as well now the first thing I want to cover is plugin so we're gonna come over here to the plugins page on the left hand side I'm gonna go through everything over here on the left hand side and I'm gonna go through the dashboard in a little bit more detail but I want to go through plugins first because they make up such an important part of your WordPress website so we're gonna click here on installed plugins the two that come with WordPress are Akismet anti-spam and Hello Dolly usually I'll get started by just deleting the Hello Dolly plug-in I never use it it just comes with every version of WordPress when you download it from directly from WordPress now Akismet anti-spam it's a plug-in that helps protect your blog from spam spam comments so it's really easy to set up if you click on activate here this is gonna activate the plug-in and then the next thing we need to do is set up our account I'm not gonna be doing that in this video you can easily set up your account and what it does is over here with comments Akismet make sure that the people that are commenting on your website aren't just spamming your website because people have built a bunch of bots that allow people to spam your website with comments this eliminates that spam so now coming back over to plugins here I think it's a huge part of WordPress and what makes WordPress so great if we click on add new for plugins you're gonna see a bunch of the most popular plugins here a kismet anti-spam classic editor jetpack BB press so these are some of the featured plugins if we come over here to popular you can see contact form 7 so this is one of the most popular plugins it's one I've used for years and it allows you to build contact forms on your website so I'll go through that but what we can do is just easily install these free plug-ins on our website and click install now okay now it's gonna say install and then we can activate it so once you install and activate a plug-in you're able to use it on your website so once we did that you can see contacts right here so this was just added because we installed that plug-in so you don't need to create custom things for your website with WordPress you can use plugins there's probably millions of plugins that you can add to your website usually at any given time on a website that I own I have 30 to 50 plugins installed some of the smaller web sites you might only have 10 to 20 but you use plugins for things like contact forms if we come over here again to add new and we come to popular again you can see Yoast SEO this is another plug-in I use it allows you to target keywords with your content it allows you to manage all their titles your meta descriptions it really allows you to optimize your website for search engines and makes it a lot easier now there's classic editor I'll go over that a little bit there's jetpack so this is a plug-in that provides a lot of different things that you can use on your website there's WooCommerce so will commerce allows you to build an e-commerce website with WordPress keep scrolling down WordPress importer so this is a popular one for people who are moving their website or they export their website from another source and they're importing it to a new domain name ok so next is element or page builder so this is a drag-and-drop page builder so another popular plug-in keep scrolling down really simple SSL so if you want HTTPS for your website you can set it up using this plug-in wordfriends security so another plug-in that gives you a little bit more security on your website it has a firewall malware scan and it'll keep track of people that are trying to log into your website it'll make sure that all your plugins are up to date so it's just another way to make sure that people aren't hacking into your website keeps going down you can see duplicate post tiny MCE advanced extends and enhances the block editor and the classic editor all in one SEO pack so a variation on Yoast contact form by WP forms so I think you get the drift there's a lot of these different plugins here and what you can do is install them and then you use these plugins on your website now it could take hours days weeks to kind of go over every single plug-in that you can use on your website so the main thing is just try to find the things that you want to do on your website and then you want to find different plugins that can help you accomplish those tasks if we come over here to recommended and we'll just scroll down here so here's a good example table press embed beautiful and feature-rich tables into your posts and pages with out having to write code so if we click on install now and we activate this plugin so what you're gonna see here is we just installed table press so now underneath this contact here we have table press so if you come to all tables what you can do is manage all of your tables here you can add new tables to your website so this is the reason you want to use plugins it just makes it really easy to manage your website and manage any changes that you want to make on your website and allow you to install some different custom features and things that are gonna make your website look a lot better so to finalize going over plugins one thing I just want to let you know about is one of the great things about using WordPress is since so many people use it there's a lot of great resources out there so if you just do a quick google search of best wordpress plugins you're gonna find hundreds or even thousands of pages that can be very useful but just using the ones on the first page you can see 12 best wordpress plugins free and paid for 2019 now if I open a couple of these here the first one that I opened is from theme grill com and you can see they have 20 plus best WordPress plugins for 20 19 essential plugins for professional WordPress websites what I like about this one is they have security plugins SEO analytics optimization and performance backup redirection so anything that you're looking for you can find plugins that will work for your website now the other one that's even an even better list is bike instead com best WordPress plugins so if we scroll down here you can see just on the left hand side they have SEO security performance page builders social media photo galleries and then even coming down here quizzes PDF age verification so pretty much anything you're looking for it they have plugins that can be very useful for you how many downloads each of these plugins have the overall rating for this so a really great piece of content so if you're looking for plugins a lot of times you can start here because you're gonna be able to find some of the best plugins based on the needs for the website that you're building now if I come back over here to my WordPress website what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come to plugins here and I'm gonna go to add new again I'm gonna show you just some of the plugins I usually start with on my website so I'm gonna come here to popular real quick and usually what I'll install is Yoast SEO and contact form 7 so I already did contact form 7 so now I'll do Yoast SEO and install this plugin and we'll activate it okay so usually what I'll do is when I'm adding new plugins to my website as I'll try to configure them as quickly as possible and what I'll do is Yoast SEO is gonna be down here to the left if you're ever looking for a plug-in so after you install the plug-in you're not sure where any of the settings are you can come to the plugins page here and a lot of them have settings links right here and then I'll bring you to the settings pages otherwise to the left hand side so something like table press is gonna create its own link here on the left contact form seven will create this here sometimes your plugins will show up here in tools or in settings so depending on the plugins that you're adding they might show up here in settings and you just have to find it from this list here they might show up here in tools as well they might show up in posts so it just depends on the type of plug-in that you're adding but you can always come to the plugins page here and click on settings and that might be helpful for configuring anything that you need to with your plugins so now if I come over here to Yoast SEO real quick and we click on it every plug-in is gonna have a page where you can edit your features so if you come here to Yoast SEO you're gonna see a dashboard here specifically for Yoast they're gonna tell you to upgrade the Yoast SEO premium you don't need to do that a lot of these plugins have premium options but you don't necessarily need to use them so over here with search appearance if we click on search appearance if I come in here to search appearance in general you're gonna see I can adjust the way my homepage SEO title looks the Meta Description here they have snippet variables that I can insert but we'll just get rid of this right now so we're just gonna keep it the way it's gonna look right now is site title page separator and tagline so I'll show you that in a little bit now if I come up to the top here you can see content types so I can click here and you can adjust the way your SEO title looks for specific posts specific pages and then you can also adjust them as you edit your posts and pages so it helps you optimize your website for search engines but essentially what I do is as I install all these new plugins I try to go through and make sure I have everything set up properly and sometimes they'll see messages at the very top here to make sure that you have everything set up so now I'm going to come back over to plugins again what I'm going to do is click on add new one more time and let's just add one more plug in here so we'll come to popular and another plug-in that I use pretty often is the word fence security plug-in so we're just gonna come here click on install now okay so we have that installed and we can activate it so now all these different plugins you can use on your website and then you just need to configure them the more you get used to installing these different plugins and finding the plugins that you really need it's gonna be much easier to set everything up so now it's gonna say you successfully installed wordfence seven point four point one so where should they send security Lords for my website so I can enter my email here for now I'm just gonna skip this step so you're gonna see here if I come to the plugins page it's gonna say please complete your wordfence installation my admin contact info and then they also have set up here a kismet account so as you install plugins it's gonna tell you to completely configure everything so that you can get started with using all these different plugins for your WordPress website so this is a quick overview of plugins if you come in here to add new there's thousands and thousands of plugins that you can add to your website Jonnie on my websites I have anywhere like I said from 30 to 50 plugins installed it really depends on the size of the website depends on what you need to get done on your website this is a really great guide here because you can see they have SEO security performance plugins page builders social media so let's just come down here and click on a random one and we'll do backups so if we click on backups here what they're gonna do is show you some of the best WordPress backup plugins so vault press and manage WP worker keeps going down best WordPress Q&A plugins so DW question and answer cm answers so there's a lot of different things that you can use here and if you're just getting started with WordPress plugins are one of the biggest parts and the biggest selling points of WordPress in my opinion because you can do anything you want with a WordPress website you just need to find the right plugins so if I click here on ecommerce it's probably gonna show me was here and then they have easy digital downloads how to sell digital products WooCommerce is a great way to just build an e-commerce store using your WordPress website so if you want to get anything done you can always find a plug-in to do it a quick Google search will help you find a lot of the top-rated plugins that you can start your website with and then even if you're using something like Yoast so if we come over here to plugins here and scroll down you Yoast SEO there's people that have put together complete Yoast tutorials and best this is so regardless of the plugins that you're using you can always find more details about how to use them properly and how to get the most out of every plug-in on your website so that's WordPress plug-in I'll probably go through them a little bit more throughout this video but I wanted to start with them because they're just a huge aspect of your WordPress website and they allow you to do anything from build galleries to building contact forms to completely creating an e-commerce website so that's how WordPress plugins well next what we're going to do is we're gonna come over to our dashboard here and then we're gonna go through blog posts and what I want to do is I'm gonna look at what my website looks like right now okay so this is what our WordPress website looks like right now Surfside digital marketing just another WordPress site and then this is gonna be our first post right here hello world welcome to WordPress this is your first post editor delete it then start writing keep scrolling down you're gonna see our recent posts so it's gonna show that our archives so it's gonna have November 2019 the current month recent comments categories and then met it down here as well so what we can do is we can come back over to our dashboard and what I want to do is come to posts here and go to all posts so if we come here you can see we have this one post here it shows author as us categories right now is uncatted Erised so if i click to add a new post so now this is the new WordPress way to add a post it's called Guttenberg I personally do not use it I use the classic editor I'll show you how to switch to the classic editor in a minute some people prefer this block style for posting so what we can do is you're gonna see welcome to the wonderful world that blocks click on the plus sign add block to add a new one there are blocks available for all types of content text headings images lists and more so you can see more tips here what we can do is let's just say add a title and what I'm gonna do here is sample blog post ok so you can see start writing or add a block so if I click here to add a block paragraph image heading gallery list keeps going down some common blocks coming down formatting so you can do some different formatting here personally I don't like the block post I just prefer to use the classic editor but if I come here to sample blog posts what we'll do is I'll just say okay so sample text goes here so I'm gonna go down one I can add a block here and let's just say I want to add an okay so I'll just upload the Surfside PPC logo here I'm just gonna show you some different things that we can do here so what we can do right here align left align Center align right you can use wide width to make sure that it's taking up the entire page and then what we can do over here click on edit image come to our media library and you're gonna see our first image here title when you upload an image you always want to add alt text for it because that allow search engines to understand what this photo is so what I'm gonna do here is Surfside PBC logo so just kind of a best practice to keep in mind is as you upload your images make sure you add alt text and describe what the image is click on select so now we have an image here so I have sample text goes here I have an image uploaded so we'll come over here you can write a caption if you want so I'll just do surf side PPC logo okay we'll come over here and we'll enter again okay so now we're down here again so you can see over here they have add image add heading and then over here add gallery so if you want to add in gallery of images you can let's just say add heading so you can see they have h2 h3 h4 so we'll just add a heading here so I'm gonna do heading 2 we'll click on enter come over here we'll do heading 3 so it's gonna be a little bit smaller do it again come down here and we'll do it one more time we'll do heading 4 just to show you how these things kind of look and how they work okay so now let's just say we want to do preview we want to preview what our first post looks like sample blog post published by me on the current date sample text goes here here's our image here's heading 2 heading 3 heading 4 so if you get used to using this block editor it's not too bad to use it can be a little bit difficult if we come over here to the right-hand side they have document and block so if we come over to document you can see their status visibility is public publish immediately stick to the top of the blog pending review right now this is a draft so when we come over here you can see it's showing a preview for our first blog post if I come over here and click on publish it's gonna publish this to our page say are you ready to publish yes we're gonna publish it one thing you can do is add tags so tags make it easier to organize your content there's post categories and there's post so generally what I do is I really focus on my post categories but tags can be useful as well I'll show you an example of how I use tags of beachfront decor in a minute but what you can do is add a new tag here for any blog post you want and it's gonna categorize your different blog posts using these tags but what I'm gonna do is just click on publish here okay so post published view posts will open it and you'll see right here surf side digital marketing sample blog post and we have our image here our sample text our headings and if we come to the top you're gonna see right up here sample blog post in the URL so just kind of a simple look at what a blog post is gonna look like after you publish it so we're gonna come back over here to add new post and what you can always do is edit this post so start writing so if we enter more text here you can add another image if we want to if we come over here to blocks maybe we want to add something else we want to add a list okay so we'll just do PPC advertising search engine optimization Google Ads affiliate marketing so just listing a few different things here we'll click on update so once you do that you click on update we can come over here to our sample blog posts again will refresh the page and it will show the updates that we just made down here so you can always update your blog post over time Jenny what I like to do is with our URLs up here at the top this is a good time to kind of go over this is after you publish your blog posts or even before you publish your first blog post I like to come over here to settings and come here to permalinks so permalinks allow you to manage what your URLs look like the setting it's automatically going to use as day and name so it's gonna use this date right here and I'll have the name right here what I do is I just change it to post name so I don't have any dates in my URLs I just have post name here so it's just gonna be surf side digital marketing comm slash post name so that's all we need to do now there's some different things you can do optional year adding category basis adding tag basis but for right now I'm just going to keep post name and click on Save Changes I would highly recommend doing that before you start publishing your blog posts so now if we come back over to our posts here come to all posts you're gonna see we have our sample blog post here no category yet I'll go over categories in a minute if we click on edit and we come over here to the right-hand side and our permalink you're gonna see sample blog post here so what we can do is click on update and we're gonna come back over to our sample blog posts and we'll refresh it and you're gonna see page not found so since we updated our permalinks it changed the actual page so we're gonna come over here get rid of this so now it's just surf side digital marketing comm slash sample blog posts we'll click on enter and now this is where our blog posts will be so I'd like to use my permalinks like this I think it makes it really organized and this is how you add blog posts to your WordPress website so this is with using the new editor the Gutenberg editor if you like using blocks like this where you have headings here you have text here you have your images here this is a great way to use it I personally don't use Gutenberg but what I like to do is use the classic editor what you need to do is find what works the best for you because there's a lot of different things you can do in here whether it's you know let's say I want to take this text right here and we just copy this right here you can add a link so I can add a link let's just say I want to link to Surfside PPC com okay so we'll add the links and now we have a link here and we click on update so we come back over to our blog post refresh it just another thing that you can do if I click here it's gonna bring me to my website now what I want to go through next is the classic editor so this is the editor I actually use for WordPress I don't really use Guttenberg so if we come over here back to our WordPress dashboard if we just come in to post real quick so I'm just gonna open up this all post page what you're gonna see is if I open this edit this is the current editor for when you are creating blog posts when you do install a new version of WordPress if you want to use the classic editor which is a little bit easier to use in my opinion but it really depends on what you're used to using I'm gonna come over here to plugins and we're gonna go to add new again and right on the front page the second one over here is classic editor if you don't see it here you could always just search plugins classic editor and we're gonna install this now and we're gonna activate it so that's all we need to do to replace the old block editor so if we come back over here to post the end we're gonna come to all posts and if we just come here to our sample blog posts again and click on edit so if we come in here what you're gonna see is they have a option and a text option so in the visual option you can see what your post is gonna look like so if it just come down here it looks pretty similar to the other editor except it's not as blocky if we scroll down here you can see we have Yoast SEO so we can actually set a focus key phrase you can change the blog title you can see right now we have our title page separator and site title so the title is sample blog post and then site title is Surfside digital marketing there's only one page of this blog post so there's no page showing up here and the separator is just this - so this is how Yoast SEO works so we'll just close this for right now we're just gonna come to the top what I generally do is I use t