WordPress tutorial: How to make a WordPress website

Key Takeaways

hey welcome to this WordPress for beginners course in this course we're going to teach you everything you need to know about setting up and managing your WordPress site but first let's take a look at what WordPress is and what it can do if you're watching this you probably already know a bit about WordPress but let's just start with the absolute Basics to be sure WordPress is a CMS or content management system it allows you to build a website and publish content that you want to share with the world there are basically three things that are Central to what WordPress does first there's an advanced text editor called The Block editor that helps you write content for your post and add all kinds of media like images and videos to them second it offers ways to manage and structure your content so it's an actual website and not just a collection of posts and pages and lastly it has all kinds of options to customize how your site works and what it looks like now the really cool thing about WordPress is that there are huge libraries of readyto use templates and features that people have created for you to handpick and apply to your site some are free some are paid in any case all of these resources allow you to do a lot of things even if you don't know how to code by making smart use of these resources you can make your site exactly what you want it to be which makes WordPress a very easy to use CMS and in this course we're going to show you exactly how to make maximum use of each beginner friendly nature another great thing about WordPress is that it's both free and open source open source means that everyone can see and contribute to the program code that shapes WordPress this creates a very powerful ecosystem WordPress doesn't belong to any one company it is free pretty adaptable by a bigger community of people who build on what's already there improving WordPress one step at a time that's one of the reasons why there are so many great extensions to the core of what WordPress provides and why it's so versatile now let's get practical what can you actually do with WordPress what are your options well only almost everything as I've told you one of the big powers of Wordpress is that you can use it to do all kinds of things want to blog that's what it was made for want an online shop no problem just install an e-commerce plugin want to set up a new site a membership site a photography site I could go on the options are countless because it's so easy to customize WordPress is a very strong and flexible Foundation that can house anything you want to build in the upcoming modules we're going to dissect this Foundation completely so you'll be able to create your website as you've always imagined it hi in the previous lesson we've discussed what WordPress is and what you can do with it and one of the things we talked about was that WordPress is open source but what does that mean in this lesson we'll explore the definition of Open Source and we'll share why we at yast think open source is so very awesome okay so what is open source open source software is software that's developed within a community everyone can use alter and distribute the code of the software people are encouraged to participate in and improve upon the software project there are a lot of examples of open- source software the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser that's open source and maybe you've heard about Linux as we've already discussed WordPress is an open source CMS and of course all of y's plugins are open source too being open source is actually one of the core values of our company but why do we love open source so much well we basically love open source for three reasons first of all we believe that open source is the best way to get new inovations and new solutions to the problems we face this comes down to two heads are just better than one the knowledge of two people or more people combined will always exceed that of one person alone we believe that if you work together on a solution this will lead to better Solutions the second reason why we love open source is because it helps avoid wasting talent and skills so lots of people around the world are working on solving the same or similar problems that's a waste of talent and skills we shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again and with open source of course we share our knowledge about the invention of the wheel we make other people benefit from our wheel and we let other people improve upon that wheel the third reason why we love open source is because open source is inclusive open source projects like WordPress invite everyone to participate really everyone if you want to contribute to Wordpress you can it doesn't matter what you want to do where you live how much money you have or what you look like everyone one has their own talents and our talents will be recognized in an open- Source Community whether you have programming skills you love translating you'll have a superb organizational skills or a great sense of community everyone can contribute at Jo we really believe in open source just like WordPress our source code is open and other people actively contribute to making it better and we contribute to other open source projects like WordPress core the the developers at y learn from each other but they also learn from all the other developers who are active in the WordPress project sparked your interest in module eightth of this course which is optional we'll discuss more about the story behind WordPress how did WordPress start what's the WordPress Community like and how can you contribute we'll tell you all about it but first we'll dive into how you can use WordPress to create your own site in the previous video we saw what you can do with WordPress what we haven't talked about yet is that there are two different versions of Wordpress wordpress.com and wordpress.org in this lesson we'll dive into the differences between these two and we'll discuss their pros and cons the main difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org is who's hosting your site wordpress.com takes care of all the hosting for you while with we. or you take care of where you host your own website this means that if you use wordpress.org you have to pay for your web hosting and domain registration while wordpress.com is free for up to 3 GB of storage space however if you use wordpress.com you will have ads on your site and you can only have a custom domain on a Premium plan your domain will be limited to one of the available subdomains like home. blog or . wordpress.com like in this example there are paid plans available however they allow you to pick premium plans which remove ads and allow you to choose your own domain for example this also means that if you use wordpress.org you own your website and data whereas if you use wordpress.com you don't fully if you want and need absolute freedom then go for wordpress.org if monetizing your site is important to you the better op here is wordpress.org the free version of wordpress.com doesn't allow you to sell ads on your site if you want to advertise you need to get a premium or business plan even with these plans you'll share a part of your Revenue with whers.my if you use wordpress.org what some people see as a con of workers.org however is that you have to do all the maintenance yourself you have to take care of updates backups and security yourself but that also means you have the freedom to choose how often you want to do backups and updates and what kind of security measures you want to take you don't have to worry about this if you use workers.com this is all automatically taken care of Okay this may be a lot to take in let's try to make this a bit easier to understand you could see using weis.com as renting a house you have limited power and control over what you can and cannot do however maintenance of the house is taken care of for you on the other hand wh.org is like owning a house you have full control and you can do anything you want with it but you also have to maintain the house yourself so if you want to get the most out of your website but also don't mind getting your hands dirty we'd recommend using workers.org this option has much better customization options and you can install any theme plugin and do just about anything with your site the rest of the course will therefore focus on how to use wordpress.org don't worry we'll take you through every step of setting up a WordPress website we promise everyone can do this after this course you'll know how to make an awesome WordPress based site in the next lesson we'll introduce all of the topics you're going to learn about in this course and we'll introduce the example case that's going to help you understand everything even better in the previous videos in this module we've discussed what WordPress is what it can do for you and what the difference is between wordpress.com and wordpress.org we've also explained why this course focuses on learning to use wordpress.org in this lesson we'll explore the topics that we'll discuss during the course so you know what you can expect furthermore we'll introduce our own example website that we're going to build from the ground up and use to illustrate how setting up a WordPress site Works in practice let's first explore the contents of this course the WordPress for beginners course consists of seven modules the first module is the current module introduction to Wordpress well you already know what we've discussed in this module the next module is called getting started with WordPress in this module we'll explain how you can get your WordPress site up and running by getting a domain hosting and a WordPress install we'll then explore the WordPress dashboard and we'll talk about the different ways you could use WordPress in the third module customizing your site will explain how you can customize your site we'll discuss themes plugins widgets and the WordPress customizer we'll Al also explore the different WordPress settings you can use to customize how your site functions in the fourth module creating content in the blog editor we'll start by explaining what posts and pages are then we'll show you how to write a poster page how to add photos and videos to those poster pages and how to use the different kinds of blocks the WordPress block editor offers the fifth module is called structuring your site and surprise this module is all about structuring your site here we'll discuss how you should organize your post and Pages using categories tags and more then in the sixth module called managing your WordPress site we'll talk about having multiple users on your WordPress site moreover we'll explain why doing updates and backups is so important and we'll show you how to go about this we'll also go into some common mistakes and how you can prevent those then we'll dive into WordPress security finally the seven module is called WordPress SEO at yast We Believe SEO is a core aspect of website optimization if you create a website you want people to be able to find you right so in this module we'll go into the things WordPress does for your SEO we'll go into how the O SEO plugin can help you with the SEO for your WordPress site and we'll talk about what you should do yourself to make sure people can find your site in the search results so you know what's coming now let's introduce the example site we'll use throughout this course everyday I'm traveling.com to really get what this site is about let's look at the five authors that set up the site meet Nora Taylor Benjamin Arya and Daniel there are a group of 20-some friends whose past crossed in Asia as they were all traveling the world independently from each other in some late night conversations at the hostel they were staying in they noticed that together they had already visited all of the world's continents and dozens of countries right there and then they decided to create their own travel blog through this blog they want to share their travel experiences with the world and report on travel Trends tips and much more they've read about WordPress and what it can do for them and they've decided to create a WordPress based site in the rest of this course we'll explain how you can create a WordPress website how you can customize it organize it and much more and because our travel bloggers are facing many of the same challenges you are we'll illustrate all of this with everyday am traveling.com so you'll see exactly how to go about this that's it for this lesson on to the next module where you'll learn how to get started with WordPress as you've seen in the last video of the previous module we've decided to set up a wordpress.org site this means you're going to have to get hosting and a domain name now the tricky thing with this topic is that how you get WordPress up and running depends on the way your hosting company has set this up so we can't show you a one-size fits all tutorial video your hosting company should have instructions ready though so it shouldn't be too difficult of a task to get your website up and running what we can and will do however is discuss a number of things you should consider when going through the process of selecting hosting and a domain name and installing WordPress first of all you'll have to decide what hosting company and what plan sues your needs we believe that investing in good hosting is always the way to go you don't want to share service with lots of other websites for example because that will slow down your site saving a few books on hosting just isn't going to be worth it in the end in the reading materials we'll go into everything you should consider when picking a host in more detail and then there's the issue of picking your domain name domain names are a very important part of building a brand and thus require some thinking you want people to be able to recognize you and find you if you're they're looking for you that's why it's often a good idea to have a short domain name that's easy to type if it's catchy that helps as well of course take our example side domain everyday on traveling.com to be honest it's not the first domain name I would choose it's quite difficult and long but still it's catchy and it has a ring to it so I still like it as an example site but ideally you'd like a shorter domain name that's easier to spell and if you have a company you'll probably want your company name as a domain name as well it's also very important to consider what TLD you choose a TLD is the last bit of your homepage URL so for example or.gov or.org of course com is the most recognizable tldd and if you're going to operate International it's really often the best way to go but good luck trying to find a good.com domain name that isn't already taken that's one of the reasons we went for everyday on traveling.com actually now if your audience exclusively consists of people within a specific country a country TLD could be good as well like NL for the Netherlands we'll go into tlds a bit more in the reading materials so let's say you've picked a host and a domain name you like what does the process usually look after that well there are different ways to go about this for one it's often cheaper to register a domain name and hosting separately there are numerous sites that allow you to register a domain name but look out prices vary a lot so make sure you do proper research and compare prices if you don't think a couple of books is worth the hassle you can get your domain name and hosting all at once as well now when you get hosting it really helps to check whether your hosting company makes it easy for you to set up WordPress again we'll review some of the choices you have to make When selecting a host in more detail in the reading materials most dedicated WordPress hosting parties make it very easy for you to set up WordPress you simply visit the site pick a plan follow the instructions and poof you have a working WordPress installation we listed some suitable hosts that make installing WordPress easy for you in the reading materials once you've selected a plan most hosts will ask you to choose a domain name or fill in the domain name you already have then it's just a matter of filling in your details and you've got your domain and hosting covered which leaves setting up your site as I've said before this really depends on how the hosting company has set this up but let's just F focus on a few things you should definitely pay attention to what's very important is that you set up your admin account properly never use admin as a username pick your own custom username and pick a strong password preferably one that you save in a password manager secondly let's talk security always make sure your website is on https we're not going to go into the details too much because it gets technical very quickly but suffice it to say that https is an encrypted safer way of sending data than HTTP and this makes your sides more secure and the SSL certificates required for this are often included in your hosting plan some hosting parties will even set it up automatically for you so it's probably wise to pick one that does if you don't make sure you put in the effort to configure it when setting up your site how exactly you do this again depends on your hosting company so they should have the proper tutorials to help you and if not you'll always be able to contact them for support lastly I'd like to note that once you've completed the installation your site is always available to you in your browser by navigating to your domain name/ wpadmin so for example everyday I'm traveling.com wpadmin you log in with your username and password which means we're ready to start exploring WordPress itself now in the next video hi so now you know which things you should take into account When selecting a host now let's see how things actually work in practice we can't cover it all because things work just a little differently for each hosting company in this screencast we'll show you how it works for Sid ground not because we think this is the best hosting company or the biggest or the cheapest we do think it's a good host but it sure is not the only one in fact we've created a list for you on yo.com WordPress hosting and this list contains only reliable and dedicated WordPress hosts this list could could be a good starting point when you're trying to find a host that fits your specific needs anyway we chose s ground for this video because it's on this list and we have experience with this host ourselves and therefore we could show you more details of the Practical process now let's get started with the Practical part let's click this link to get some more information on our example host site gr here you can see some features it comes with free SSL we've talked about this before makes your site more secure so that's included a CDN is also very useful it can improve the loading speed of your site and we'll come back to that in a later module about WordPress SEO next you can see the PHP version s ground supports PHP is important for your s speed as well and for security too PHP is is the programming language that's used to build and maintain WordPress WordPress itself encourages updating to its recommended version which is PHP 7.3 right now which is the latest version so we're good because 7.3 is the default version for this host now there's more to read on this page about the admin interface support related things and the locations of the server and how this host gives back to the Community let's assume that we've read of all of this it feels right and you want to know what plans this host office let's click this link to visit the actual site of sround and find out more ah WordPress hosting yes that's what I'm looking for let's click it officially recommended by wordpress.org that's always good now it seems that they offer three different plans startup grow big and Go Geek of course each plan has a different price tag questions you have to ask yourself how many websites do I have how many webspace do I need how many visitors do I expect let's say the startup plan fits my needs best take a look at the extra features over here free WordPress install Okay so the installation of word press is taken care of free WordPress migrator okay if I already have a site and I want to migrate it to this host then my host will take care of it free SSL and https there it is again free email free CDN free daily backups and of course a lot more let's scroll down a bit to see what's there on the left more information about launching a new WordPress website we save you the trouble of downloading installing and configuring WordPress manually by offering a simple click and install option that's nice no technical knowledge required great on the right you can learn more about how to transfer or migrate an existing site from another host to this host and over here you can find more information about security and updates and performance now let's say I've done my research and I've made up my mind it's going to be the startup plan for me so get me that plan as you can see I've selected my plan and step two is to choose a domain name if you want to register your domain here for this price then enter your domain name here and select your TLD as we've said before you don't have to register your domain with your Hosting account if you don't want to you can register your domain elsewhere too or maybe you already have an existing site with the registered domain name in both cases you can click the other option enter your domain name and then proceed in my case let's say I want to register a new domain let's enter the details one more time and click proceed ah and it's still available that's of course not always the case for example let's enter yo.com to see what happens this domain is already taken so let's stick to Everyday I'm traveling.com step three is review and complete fill in your details check your order which is in this case a startup plan for 12 months and domain registration and then pay done what happens next again depends on the hosting company you've chosen maybe you're redirected to your Hosting account directly or maybe you'll receive an email with instructions to log in somewhere in the next video we'll show you how it works for site ground after we've purchased the sideg ground plan we are redirected to the sround dashboard at my. siteground.com here we will see various options having to do with our account as you can see as I'm scrolling down we're going to focus on the most important thing right now and that is to connect our domain to an actual installation so I'm going to go ahead and click on websites and in the following screen you can see that there currently is not a website in our account so the logical step is to add a website so we're want to click here at the bottom where it says create website now the moment that I do this I am prompted with the next option and that is to choose the domain and uh that can be a new domain an existing domain or a temporary domain but since we have already purchased our domain we're going to click on existing domain and select that one you can see from the moment that I've clicked on existing domain we have the option to enter our domain name here at the bottom so every day I'm traveling is the domain we said we're going to use so as we click on continue we're going to see that indeed the domain we wish to use is not registered at our site ground account so we have to make sure um that in order to have access to this domain we will need to update its DNS settings after we've created the site we're going to pretend that this has already been done and we're going to click continue anyway now the next step is where we can actually start creating a new website so start a new website is what we're going to select here and as I click select I am prompted with a bunch of applications to choose from obviously we're going to select the very first one the WordPress application so we select that one and we are immediately prompted with with an extra input field to set up my WordPress login once I've entered both my email address and password the one I want to use for the administrator account for my WordPress site I will click continue and the last step of the adding a new website wizard presents me with the option to also install or activate a sround s scanner on my account we're going to ignore that for now and just click finish now the next step is all happening behind the screens and uh site ground is actually creating a fully installed wepr installation for us once the sideg ground site installer has finished we can click on websites menu tab again and then we can see here that everyday I'm traveling.com is indeed connected to our Hosting account it displays the WordPress logo so that means we have a WordPress installation ready at everyday traveling.com so the next thing we're going to do is click on the button here at the right where it says WordPress kit once I click that I am presented with a bunch of tools that we can use um our first job is to jump into the WordPress admin itself so that's what we're going to do we're going to enter our login credentials that we've created in an earlier step from the moment we have started the login process we are taking to a next Wizard and that wizard is called the WordPress starter and it will guide us through a few steps to welcome us to our WordPress website so we're just going to click Start now at the bottom and we can choose different types of themes we're not going to do that we're going to stay with the default in this case 2017 uh theme and the next step is us clicking on continue at the very bottom once I click continue I am presented with the few other options I can select a contact form I can select uh a shop plugin if I need it or a few other ones I'm going to ignore what the other options are here and basically just hit continue and only select the contact form as you can see and the next step is probably the most important one because here you have the option to optimize for SEO so we're going to select that one we're going to hit complete and the installation is now in progress meaning our workers installation is going to be prepared by the options we have selected in the past three steps it's installing the theme it's importing some sample data and congratulations our site is ready so we have successfully completed the installations of everything that we selected and the next step we're going to do is go to our dashboard now this isn't the default dashboard um this is a specialized dashboard created by S ground so your actual dashboard will look different I'm just going to scroll down and see what's here and I'm going to check one specific menu item here where says SG Optimizer which stands for srpt Optimizer we're going to click on that and see what type of options we have here now the most important one for now is the environment optimization because we do want to make use of https that is a more secure way of serving your website to visitors this will force htps that is exactly what we want so we're going to hit confirm and now https is available next step is go back to the dashboard and for that we need to log in once more and now we're done now that you have installed WordPress in this video I will show you how to navigate the WordPress backhand the back end is your control room from here you can share the magic you create with the world or put less poetically from the back end you can add edit and remove the content on your website as well as control what your site looks like one thing to note before we start exploring the WordPress back end is that depending on your host a couple of things may look slightly different in your WordPress installation for example your host may add different sample pages from the standard WordPress ones or install some plugins by default we are working with a clean local install that is a completely basic setup as you can already see on the screen there is a lot you can do in this video I will briefly show you the options in the toolbar and the dashboard in the next video we will also see the options in the admin menu we will go into much more detail on all of the options you see here in the other videos of this course so let's begin at the top of the screen you can see the toolbar this is your administrator toolbar bar and it does not appear to people visiting your website the first icon you see in the toolbar is the WordPress logo from here you can easily access WordPress related sites and documents furthermore by clicking on the name of your page you will be taken to a screen that shows your homepage this is what your visitors see when they go to your site you could use this option to see what any changes you've made actually look like now let's go back to the toolbar and see the next option which allows you quick access to the comments screen finally the toolbar menu item titled new allows you to quickly write new posts upload New Media write pages and add new users on the right side of the toolbar you can edit your profile and log out by clicking your login name or edit my profile you will access the profile screen here you can add some personal information such as your name and contact info and most importantly at the bottom of the screen is where you can change your password now that we've seen the toolbar let's go to the more exciting part the dashboard when you first logged in with WordPress you probably saw the welcome message this message is within a box that we call a dashboard widget when you are new to Wordpress everything may seem intimidating so the WordPress developers created this widget with the intention to guide you through the most important first steps you can take in creating your site below you can see that there are a few other widgets as well now the widgets that you see on your dashboard are just the default ones when you install plugins other widgets may show up here as well and that will allow you to manage your site in various ways but let's quickly see what each of these default widgets provides the add a glance widget shows you what the current number of your posts comments and pages is it also shows you what version of Wordpress you currently using as well as the team that you have activated you can see that the options for posts comments and pages are blue that means that you can click on them and be taken to their respective editing screens for a more detailed preview of your posts and comments there is the activity widget first you can see the most recent published posts and their titles click on them and you will be taken to the post editing screen where you can make changes if necessary below the recently published posts are the recent comments the recent comment section in this widget allows you more than meets the ey from here you can see who commented and access their profile as well as view the comment and the post that relates to as you may be aware comments sometimes need managing and there are plenty of options for that here for example you can choose to unapprove quickly reply edit Market spam delete or view a comment lastly this widget gives you an overview and quick access to all the comments on your website moving on to the quick drafts widget if you have a new post idea and you want to jot it down quickly you can do it via the quick drafts widget all you need to do is enter a title write a piece of text and click save as the title suggests this is just a draft and it will not be published on your site clicking on the link of the draft will take you to the post screen where you can edit the draft and write a longer complete version of your idea finally in the WordPress news and events you are offered a quick glimpse into the WordPress World by clicking on the links to meetups word camps and news you can learn more about these topics the widgets that we talked about are not static or set in stone you can easily move close open or delete them from your dashboard if you hover over the top of one of the widgets you can see a cross Arrow appear by clicking and holding your left Mouse button and dragging the arrow you can move this widgets around you are free to arrange the widgets As You Wish if some of them are not useful to you you can also choose to close them every widget has an arrow pointing upward in the upper right corner by clicking on the Arrow you will see the widget close or collapse the arrow is now pointing downwards if you want to open the widget again simply click on the downward pointing Arrow if you want to get rid of a widget completely you can do that via the screen options the screen options tab is located in the upper right corner below the administrator tab click on it and you will see a menu that contains the widgets we discussed with Ted boxes next to them if you untick a box of a respective widget it will no longer be on your dashboard if you want to put it back just take the box again that is your dashboard and all you can do in it in the next video we will explore some more ways you can work with your site through the admin menu hi welcome back in the previous video we saw the options there are in the administrator toolbar and in the D dashboard in your WordPress backend in this video we will explore the admin menu well first things first where can you find the admin menu well at the far left of your screen you can either hover over the menu item to see the tabs and then click on the one you need or you can click on the menu item itself and then click the tab you want to go to let's now go into the menu items one by one and see the options they have at the top of the admin menu is the dashboard which we already discussed by clicking the dashboard menu item you can also see the updates tab the update stab gives you access to the update screen from where you can get information on which version of Wordpress you are using and if your plugins and themes are all up to date you can also take actions and manually check for updates as well as reinstall updates now let's move on to one of the most important menu items of the endit menu posts this is the command center for writing and managing your posts you will probably spend a lot of time here working on your content and perfecting your posts and of course we will tell you all about how to write a post in a later video now let's preview what exactly you can do here click on the posts menu item and you will see the post screen open under the all post tab the most important is the add new button and the add new tab both give you access to the same screen where you can add brilliant texts beautiful images and other media if you go back you will see the other options that you have the post screen shows you all the posts you have created so far you can see who created them the categories and tags that they were assigned the number of comments and the date of publishing you can hover over the title of a post to reveal more editing and managing options once you have a lot of posts it will be difficult to navigate all of them from a list that's why you can filter your posts by date or by category when searching for them you can also take actions such as deleting and editing more posts at once and you can also search your posts via the search post Button as you can see the post menu item also contains the tabs categories and tags let's keep it simple for now because there's a whole video about categories and tags waiting for you in a later module for now it's enough to know that categories allow you to classify your posts into groups or subgroups and this makes it easier for visitors to navigate your site if you click on the categories tab in the admin menu you will see a screen where you can add edit assign and delete categories besides categories you can also add tags to your texts as you can see this screen is very similar just like categories tags can help your visitors navigate your site now let's explore the media menu item which allows you to manage your media media can be anything photos videos audio usually you add your media when preparing your post and while working in the post screen we'll show you this in a later video as well but here you can view edit and delete media that you have already uploaded to navigate the library with more ease you can search for media items in the search box and you can also search or sort based on the type of item or the date you can upload New Media files by clicking the button add new or by clicking the tab over here now let's see what's below the media menu item this item is called Pages what's the difference between a post and a page do you know it's vital information so we'll explain the difference in a separate video later on however the all pages tab which takes you to the overview of all your pages is very similar to the all posts Tab and the same goes for the add new tab where you can create new pages moving on next in the admin menu is the commons menu item that takes you to the commment screen here you can see and access the comments that your readers leave on your posts from here you can can also approve comments or unapprove provide replies edit Market spam or simply delete you may have noticed by now that the menu items and the respective tabs and screens we went over are similar and they all allow you to control what you post what your posts contain what comments appear on your site and so on and so forth besides controlling the content of your website you also have a lot of options to edit its appearance through the appearance menu item first there is the themes tab that lets you control what your website looks like you can see the default installed themes here only this one is activated it's important to know that your theme influences the options you have in your appearance menu item another theme could provide more tabs here you can find yourself a new theme by clicking the add new button you can further customize your website site via the customized menu item here you can change the active theme and you can customize the site identity colors how the menus and widgets appear on your site and what is shown on the homepage again the options you have here are influenced by the theme that is active on your site if you're able to code you can also insert your code via the additional CSS option going back to the admin menu under the appearance tab we have the widgets widgets are simple pre-built blocks that you can add to your site like a search bar or a map to locate your store you can manage them through the widgets screen on the left you'll see the available widgets and on the right you'll find the areas on your site where you can place them which widgets and widget areas you see here again depends on your theme and on the plugins you're using okay next the menus tab here you can create and edit the menus that appear on your website and finally when it comes to your appearance you can edit the themes in the theme editor but for this you need to know how to code if you are unfamiliar with coding it's best not to touch this part the next menu item is called plugins plugins make it possible for you to add some extra features to your website you can add a new plugin with this button over here or by clicking the tab at new in the overview you can manage the plugins that you have installed for us the screen is empty because we haven't installed any plugins yet for the advanced user there's also the plug-in editor where you can make changes to the code of the plugin you need coding skills for this so for now we will not go into that let's move on and see what the users menu item is about I know it's a long video but we're almost there the all users tab shows you all the users of the website here you can add users and edit the role of each user on your website what's the user well it really depends on the type of site you have there are user roles like admin subscriber author and much more more depending on the roles you assign the rights of what a user can do will differ you can edit your own profile by clicking the your profile tab here you can add information change your name add a profile picture in the admin menu there is also the tools menu item you can see the available tools here if you migrated from a different platform or system you can import your posts and comments via the import tab for example if you want to import posts comments and users from a blogger blog you can do it here you can also import content from another WordPress site and you can import but you can also export your content as you can see you can download your post pages and media in an exportable file besides the content of your page you can also export or delete your personal data and let's not forget this seld check a really cool feature of Wordpress 5.2 if you click it you see two tabs status and info and the percentage over here which is an indication of how healthy your site is in our case that's 81% and we have three recommendations to improve this if you click the arrow you'll get some background information about the issue and an actionable advice if you click pass tests you can see the other items that were checked the other tab info shows you a lot of information about the configuration of your WordPress site all in one place could be really handy if for example a support engineer or developer wants to know some technical details about your site and you don't know what he or she means and where you can find it you can now easily export this info and create a list for them with this button really helpful finally we have arrived at the last menu item in the admin menu the settings by the way it's very well possible that more admin menu items will appear in your back end plugins for example can add more items okay back to the settings yes well since this video is already quite long I'll not discuss them here we've created a separate lesson about the settings in module 3 we'll also dive a little bit deeper into themes widget plugins and other ways to customize your site so don't worry if this is all a bit overwhelming we will take you through all the different options step by step in the following modules it's going to be fun in the previous lessons of this module you've learned how to get WordPress up and running we've also shown you what the WordPress back end looks like and what you can do with it however there's one important question we haven't discussed yet how will you use WordPress so that's what this video will be about WordPress started as a blogging platform however over the years it evolved into a full content management system which can be used to build all kinds of websites you can use WordPress in many different ways to create a blog a Business website an online store a membership website or to sell online courses you could also use WordPress to create an online portfolio a forum an online resume a job listing site a knowledge base or a help desk with the right themes and plugins the possibilities of Wordpress are endless but before you start building your WordPress site it's important to think about what you want to achieve with your site what's the mission of your site the mission of your website consists of the ideas you have about your website every website owner has certain expectations of their visitors you want them to read your post or to buy your products perhaps you want to inform or entertain your readers or to improve their lives with your awesome products your mission is the foundation of your website so you shouldn't think too lightly of this take the time and literally write down the mission of your website you have to come up with one mission one message to send to your audience once that message is clear to you you'll be able to communicate it much better to your audience to help you formulate the mission of your website we've made a list of questions you should be able to answer we've included this list in a reading materials once you've written down the mission of your site you can start thinking about how you will use WordPress what should your website look like and what kind of functionalities do you need on your site to achieve your mission for the example side of this course everyday I'm traveling.com the mission statement could be something like we want to share our travel experiences with the world and report on travel Trends and tips the five friends want to accomplish this by writing blog posts in these posts they can write about the their experiences all over the world give their ERS tips on where to stay and where to eat and much more but they also want to interact with their readers through comments and perhaps social media so for the five friends of everyday I'm traveling.com it would be best to create a WordPress based blog this blog should have a common functionality and social sharing options like the friends of our example site everyday traveling.com most people use WordPress for blogging and as we've seen WordPress began as a blogging platform so the blogging functionalities are already built in and ready to go because of this we'll focus on using Wordpress for blogging in this course don't worry if you'd want to create a different kind of site though we'll briefly explore other functionalities as well in the next module we'll discuss how you can customize your website to really make it fit your mission we'll go into themes widgets plugins the WordPress customizer and all the different customization settings WordPress offers when you start with WordPress you will want to Brand your website and give it a personal touch a good way to begin customizing your website is with the settings in the admin menu in this video I will show you the general settings that allow you to add it your title and tagline edit your url manage the registrations choose the language of the site and set the time and date format we start in the dashboard then click on the settings menu item in the admin menu this will open the general settings screen the first thing you can do in the general settings screen is give your site a title the site title does not have to be the same as the site name in the URL in this case we already have a title and I will leave it like this to preview the site name as it appears on the site first click the save changes button at the bottom of the screen if you made any changes then click on the title of the page in the toolbar your site will open and you will see how the title appears note that the title is shown in the tab here as well next to the title of the page there is also the tagline to edit the tagline we go back to the general settings screen we add the new tagline in the Box here by simply typing it out it is advisable to be concise and precise here so you can get your message across as clear as possible search engines also index your s and tagline so make sure to make them relevant and increase your chances of ranking better for example I will put something like learning about the world through travel here we repeat the same procedure as before first we click save and then we click on the title of the page to see the change in this example the site title And the tagline are in the header note that depending on the team you use this may differ now that you have that covered let's go back to see what else you can do in the general setting screen below the tagline there are two boxes both related to the URL the first one refers to the WordPress address this this is the address that shows where you installed WordPress and where your WordPress files are stored in our case this is HTTP everyday I'm traveling. looc and the other one is the address of the site and in our case that is the same okay let's see what other options are in this screen add your email address if you want to receive notifications from WordPress whenever someone posts a comment or registers on your site to enable people to register an account on your site all you need to do is stick the anyone can register box with this setting enabled people will be able to register through the login screen if you allow registrations there are various roles you can assign you can manage these through the new user default Ro menu we will tell you about the user roles in more detail in module 6 for now it is enough to know that you can keep the subscriber option if you plan to allow anyone to register on your site subscribers will be able to access their profile and edit it but they will not have any administrative rights in your back end contributors authors editors and administrators have more rights ranging from Simply being able to write posts in the back end which is the role of a contributor to full control in the back end which is the role of the administrator finally the last few options inin general settings are related to Lang language and time the language option regulates the main language of both your public site and the back end click on the menu here to reveal the available languages choose the one you want by clicking on it click save you see that the language has now changed in this screen as well as the admin menu click on the site name and you see that the language of the menus on the front end changed as well let's go back and change back the language to the default and move on the time zone option is Handy if you want your visitors to be able to see for example when someone published a comment click on the menu and you will see the UTC options if you are unsure about your time zone scroll up and choose a city if your city is not listed choose a city that is closest to where you live for example I'm located in vihan the Netherlands but vihan is not in the list so I choose the closest city which is Amsterdam use the date and time format options to choose how dates and time will appear on your site either click on the radio button next to the preferred format or add a custom one in the Box here the final option in the general settings is the week use this option if you want to feature a calendar on your site then you can choose the date that the calendar will start with so we saw how you can personalize your site with a title and a tagline we also saw how to edit the URL what you can do with registrations on your page and how to set the language time and date on your site in the next video we will explore the writing and the reading tabs from the settings menu item in the previous video we talked about the general settings that can help you put a personal stamp on your website in this video we will look at the writing and reading settings these settings will allow you to choose a default post category and format adjust the settings of the RSS feed and determine how your homepage is displayed click on the settings menu item then the writing settings tab and you will see the writing settings screen appear the first setting you have here is the default post category the setting simply allows you to pick a category that WordPress will use by default in cases when for example you've forgotten to assign a category to a post or if you've deleted a category that already contains some posts click on the drop- down menu and you will see the list of categories you already have right now we do not have many categories but we will create some and show you how to create them yourself in module 5 the default category for this option is uncategorized but of course you can change that if you want to next is the default post format setting click on the menu to reveal the options not that you can change the default post format only if the team you have installed supports this setting in this case the 2019 team does not support the default post format if the team you are using supports it you can choose a default post format from the drop- down menu you see that there are many different options so for example if you have a Blog where you post a daily quote you can set the quote option as a default and have your posts appear as quotations as you can see in this example moving on to the next setting we see the post via email this option is somewhat Advanced and it involves creating a secret email account in some cases you may also need assistance from your web host these settings would also differ per case so we will not go into the details of how to set this up right now finally on the screen there is the update Services setting this setting allows you to let others know when you post new content on your site in the Box here there is one default URL RPC Pingo matic.com that is the default update service that word press notifies when you have published a new post if you click on the update Services link above the box you can access a list of other ping Services you can copy and paste them in the update Services box to add them to your list if you wish to do so if you prefer you can also remove the default updating service don't forget to click the save changes button whenever you make changes to any of the settings in the screen otherwise your new settings will not be saved that's it we can now move on to the next step in the settings reading on the screen you can choose some settings that will regulate how your posts are displayed on your site first you can choose what is displayed on your homepage it is important to think about what you want your visitors to see when they first open your page if you plan to regularly publish blog post then the first option your latest post may be the way to go to select that option simply click on the your latest post button and click save if we go to the homepage of our example site we see that the latest posts are now displayed use the other setting a static page if you have a key important message you want to share with your visitors to enable this setting you will need to choose a page that will be displayed on your homepage as well as a separate page where your post will be published note that you must choose different pages for the homepage and for the post to be able to choose the homepage you will of course first need to create it we will show you how you can create pages and use this setting in the next module when we discuss pages and posts for now I have created one just to show you how these settings work I will choose this page as the homepage next I will need to choose the page where the posts will appear you should create a separate page for the post as well for example a page called posts or blog in this case I will choose this one that I've previously created I click save and let's see what that looks like on the site you can now see that instead of the recent post I have the what is this blog about page displayed the post can be accessed via the post page in the menu as well as the recent post and archive feature not that if you do not assign your post to a separate page they will still be visible but only through the other navigation features for example the recent post or archives moving on to the next setting in the screen where you can choose how many blog posts per page are displayed on your site the default option here is 10 but you can choose to show one if you want to change the number by simply typing it into the box here you can also set the maximum number of posts that will be sent out via your RSS feed and whether those feeds will contain a a full text or a summary finally the last setting in the screen is related to the search engine visibility this setting prevents search engines like Google for example from indexing your site if your purpose for setting up a website is to reach a wide audience then you should leave this box unted if however for whatever reason you want your website to be private do take this box by selecting the setting normal visitors with access to your web page link will still be able to visit your site but the search engine Bots will have a harder time finding it and so it will also be harder to share it with the public we'll explain more about this in a later module about WordPress SEO it is also important to note as it is stated here that even if you have this option enabled it is up to the search engines to respect the request now that we went through all the settings and the reading settings screen we can continue to The Next Step the discussion before we do do not forget to always save any changes you made hi so far we saw the settings you can manage to personalize your site to control how you publish and how your posts are displayed in this video we will talk about the various comment settings let's go straight into it go to the discussion settings screen by clicking on the settings menu item and then click on the discussion tab the first three options are bundled under the default article settings the first two settings relate to pings a ping is a techy way of saying notification clicking this option enables you to Ping or notify sites that you have linked to in your posts for instance in our example site we could be writing about the best restaurants we have visited for a trip if we link to the site of some of those restaurants and this is important if the restaurant site allows it the mention could appear in their comment section the next option in this setting regulates the same thing but the other way around so by ticking this box you allow other sites to ping you if you are pinged by another site a comment or mention will appear on your site now the third option is about whether you allow people to comment on your articles or not you can manipulate last two settings for each individual post so if you want to allow comments or pings on your post in general but there is one specific post that you want to have no comments or pinks on you can choose that in the individual post editing page and this will overwrite the general settings let me show you how if you add a new post you will see the sidebar on the right scroll down and click the discussion tab you can now change the general setting by ticking or unticking the boxes okay let's go back and see what the other commment settings section well that's a mou is about if you check the first box then people who write comments on your posts have to fill out their name and email if you check the second box people have to be registered and logged in to comment but you can only do this if registration is open people can only register if you have enabled the setting in the general settings let's go there to show you what I mean this box anyone could register should be ticked okay let's go back next is the option to automatically close comments on articles other than a certain amount of days you can change default of 14 days into something else by typing or clicking the arrows moving on we have the option to show commment cookies opin checkbox that means that the cookies of the author of the comment will be saved the upside of that is that by saving the data of the user they will not need to repeat the same login steps every time and the downside is a may feel intrusive for the privacy of the users the next option allows you to choose whether you want to have threaded comments and how deep deep they should go that means that instead of having replies to comments pile up with no order you can choose to have a comment thread here you can choose the level of the thread from the menu with the maximum level being 10 and note that how threaded comments appear depends on the theme you are using another way to keep comments neat is to break them down into Pages add the number of comments per page in this box and choose which comment will appear first by clicking on this menu finally in this section you can choose whether you want to show the older or the newer comments first the next two options allow you to receive emails when people post a comment or when a comment is awaiting moderation you can further control how comments appear on your site with the before a comment appears options you can choose to manually approve comments in case manually approving each comment is too much work you can also choose to approve only the comments of firsttime commenters by choosing this option you will enable anyone who has previously been approved a comment to post future comments with no restriction to further help you with moderation WordPress also has the option to hold off comments that contain a lot of links change the default number of links to the number you desire by typing the number here below this option you see a box here you can type in the words names URLs email addresses or IP addresses that you want cued for approval before they appear on your site you can also Blacklist them with this option those comments will automatically be considered as spam and they will not appear in your queue nor on your site of course the last option in the discussion screen refers to use of avatars avatars are the little photos people use as a sort of profile picture besides avatars there are also gravitar these are pictures that people can use across platforms to sort of maintain their their identity with this setting you can control whether Avatar or gravitar appear on your site in the comment section if you want to show avatars please make sure that you pick a theme that supports the presence of avatars as well otherwise taking this box will have no use gravitar have ratings that go from G suitable for all audiences to X for mature audiences the ratings are related to the content of the photo that is used for the gravitar the owners of the gravitar set the ratings themselves and here you can choose which images based on their rating you allow to appear on your page in the comment section if you choose PG for example which is suitable for audiences of 13 and above both G suit able for all audiences and PG will be included in the allowed ratings The same logic is valid for the other options finally you can choose default avatar for people with no Avatar or gravar of their own as you can see here there are plenty of options to choose from that's it for the discussion screen do take time to explore this screen because comments can be just as important as posts and don't forget to save your changes of course in the screencast I will take you through the last three setting steps media permal links and privacy when you click media you'll have a couple of options that help you manage images in your library the first thing you need to know is that when you upload an image WordPress automatically saves a copy of that image in four different sizes a original thumbnail which is very small medium and large but why would you want to edit this well imagine that there's a certain image size that you'd want to use very often like for example in your post you like to use an image of 300 by 600 because it fits the way you want to structure the text around the image in that case you could make the standard dimension for medium 300 by 600 and you'd be able to very easily use the medium size and add images to your posts quite quickly now for each of these sizes you can set maximum dimensions in pixels so by default a thumbnail is 150 by 150 pixels for thumbnails there's an extra box that allows you to decide whether an image should be exactly that Dimension if so WordPress will cut off part of the image to fit the dimensions if not it will scale the original image proportionally for thumbnails I'd advise you to leave this box checked the last option at the bottom is about managing your media library if you leave it checked WordPress will create folders for every month and year this makes it easier to browse through images so I definitely leave this on unless you have good reasons not to okay on to the permalink settings a permal link is basically the full URL of your post or page URLs should be readable and meaningful to users therefore it's important to consider what URL structure fits your website the URLs that will show are visible for each setting on this screen what works best depends on your site a custom structure is often a good option because it allows you to pick what's best for you the percentages here indicate so-called variables so for the ear variable the URL will show the year in which the post was published and for the category variable the URL will feature the category the post is in for most blogs I like a category than post name structure in this way the position of your post within your site structure will be most clear as we'll see later in this course you can always edit the last part of your url the so-called slug for every individual post you write so just make sure that you select a structure that makes sense for most of your posts here and make any tweaks when writing individual posts lastly there's an optional heading here you can change something for very specific Pages your category and tag archive Pages these pages are automatically created when you create a category or tag they're basically a list of all the posts that are in a certain category or tag with this setting you can change the url for those like for our travel blog imagine that all of our categories were countries normally with the settings we chose above the category archive page URL would be everyday I'm traveling. lo/ Mexico for example we could then enter countries here and the category archive URL would then become everyday I'm traveling. lo/ SL countries SL Mexico again this setting doesn't influence URLs of your posts or Pages whatso however just category and tag archive Pages the engine X documentation will only appear for servers running andex and it's aimed at Advanced users so we can skip that the last stab we're going to look at in this screencast is the Privacy tab here you can edit your privacy policy there's a template that WordPress provides for you which covers some important stuff but it's incomplete and depends on additions on your part as you can see when I click edit here as you see at the bottom WordPress has set up some headings about topics it simply can't provide information on because that's up to you it's wise to check the regulations in the country you're in and see if your privacy policy complies luckily the page features some links to helpful suggestions you can also choose to create your privacy policy from scratch and that's it for this screencast in this module we'll take you through the process of customizing your site a logical Point of Departure is your theme in this video we'll explain what a theme is and what you should consider when choosing a theme a theme handles the way your weers site looks it serves as a representation for your brand but at the same time takes care of the visual representation of Wordpress content and data like pages and posts simply put a theme is what a person will see when visiting your website our own example site everyday I'm traveling.com could look like this or like this or like this it all depends on the theme you choose WordPress comes upon installing with a set of pre-installed themes to choose from it's very possible that none of these themes are to your liking or that they don't meet your specific needs but the beauty of Wordpress is that it comes with a huge Community which means that there are tons of thirdparty themes to choose from both paid and free if you want to look beyond what pre-installed themes have to offer we'd like to refer you to the WordPress theme directory at wordpress.org themes all the themes here are reviewed and approved by the WordPress team to assure their quality you can also access this theme directory by logging into your WordPress backend and navigating to appearance themes add new theme from here it's even easier to download and install a theme directly into your WordPress installation later on in this course we will go into detail on how to install a theme but how do you decide what theme is suitable for you in your website first really try to determine what the purpose is of your website does your website serve as a business card for you or your company that only consists of a few static informative pages is your website of blog which is regularly updated with new posts or is your website an e-commerce platform choosing a theme can be an over overwhelming process because of the thousands of themes that are available establishing the purpose of your website can really help you in choosing a theme it can serve as a filter to narrow down your options the WordPress plug-in directory for example offers those filters but a lot of theme vendors out there offer roughly the same approach apart from the fact that the theme should fit the purpose of your website there are other things to consider when choosing a theme first off depending on your experience with WordPress it might be a good idea to choose a theme that offers support that way you can get assistance with setting up or customizing your theme be mindful of the fact that not all themes offer support another thing to be aware of is that the theme is mobile ready this means that your website is properly accessible for mobile devices the best way to test this is to activate the theme and check it yourself on your mobile phone try to establish whether the mobile experience is satisfying enough to you the final thing we'd like to mention and this one is fairly technical is that the theme should be cross browser compatible this is an interesting way of saying that the theme should work properly on all the popular browsers both on desktop and mobile devices the reason for this is that not all browsers support the same web Technologies a theme developer should take this into account but not all do so be sure to test this yourself when setting up your website so in this video we mentioned four things to keep in mind When selecting a theme pick a theme that fits the purpose of your website consider whether you need a theme that offers support and make sure that your theme works properly on mobile devices and all popular browsers once you pick your theme the next step is to install it in the upcoming screencast we'll show you exactly how to do this in this screencast will walk you through the process of installing and activating a new theme when you're logged into your web press site and you're on the dashboard you can go through the theme overview by going to appearance themes this is way you manage your installed themes WordPress comes with a few pre-installed themes with one of them already activated on your website this distinction is important an install theme is not automatically active on your website the active theme is the theme that your visitors will see when navigating to your website when you go to the top left corner and click visit site you can see how it looks there's not a lot there but you get the idea if you want to use another theme on your website you could do so by hovering over the other themes in your overview this triggers two options activate and live preview activate immediately activates this theme on your website which as we stated before makes it visible to your visitors this might not be something you want at this stage it's always advisable to first test how a theme looks on your website before you activated to do this you can choose the live preview option this will take you to the so-called customizer which we'll discuss later in this course here you're able to check out and test how your website will look with this specific theme activated happy with how it looks then you could click activate and publish at the top left of the screen this activates the theme clicking the cross next to it will take you back to the theme overview here you'll notice that the theme you just activated is indeed marked as active it is possible to install a new theme of you're choosing you can do this by clicking add new at the top of the theme overview or by clicking the large add new theme tile here you see an overview of available themes you can install you can either use the available filters at the top of the screen or use the search field at the top right of the screen to narrow down your choice if you find a theme to your liking you can either choose to first preview it or directly install it installing the theme doesn't automatically activate it once it's installed you can choose to activate it by hovering over the theme and clicking activate or by navigating back to your themes overview and clicking live preview or activate here as you could see now this theme is active it might not look like much when you don't have content yet but we'll fix that soon if you've downloaded your theme from a third party you can upload this by again choosing add new in your themes Overview at the top of this screen is the option to upload a theme you'll be presented with an option to upload a zip file for the theme click choose file navigate to the zip file that you need open and install now your theme will be installed and added to your themes overview there you're able to activate or preview it that's it for now we'll choose the default theme again and in the next lesson we'll show you which options you have to further customize your site now that you've selected a theme you'll probably want to tweak it to your personal preferences to make it easy for you WordPress created the customizer with the customizer you can quickly make changes to the design of your site or the elements on your pages such as your site branding your menus and your widget and you won't have to touch any code you can find the customizer by going to appearance customize if you're looking at your site and you're logged in you can also find this option in the toolbar at the top this opens a new interface with a preview of your website on the right and a menu full of interesting settings on the left so let's dig dig in and see what we can find by the way the settings you see here are the default options in the customizer but additional options may appear here depending on which theme you're using oh and these icons down here they allow you to preview how your changes look on different devices let's go to site identity that's all about The Branding of your site what do you want visitors to see at the top of every page on your site well let's start with a logo we've got a nice logo set up here let's open it upload it to the media library select it and there it is at the top of your page next to your title and tagline you can also change your title and tagline in the customizer now we've already changed the tagline in the general settings but let's change it again here to show you how it works let's change it from learning about the world through travel to a WordPress site about traveling you can also upload a site icon do you know what it is you won't see it on your page but you can find it in the browser tab let me show you an image of the logo could work here as well so let's select the one that's already in the media library select no need to crop it and here you are the menu shows you a previe preview of how this will look and of course we can also check it ourselves here it is let's go back to the next section colors colors allow you to change the global colors from things like links and buttons and again it depends on the theme which things you can actually change if we scroll down we see a button and some links and as you can see they are all blue now we can change that by clicking custom and then play a bit with the colors Maybe a shade of green because that's in our logo as well although blue is also nice H but I like green more so it's going to be green if you take this box a greenish filter will be applied to your featured image as well you cannot set a featured image in the customizer so we'll come back to that later you'll notice that the featured image will look pretty green once we set it could be really ugly let's move on to menus menus help visitors navigate your site to find what they need and that's really important so here you can customize where your menus will appear on your site and which pages are included in your menu it depends on your theme how many areas you have to locate a menu it says here that our theme has three let's check them out okay we have a primary menu a footer menu and a Social Links menu nice well let's create a new primary menu to help customers make sense of our site add a name here like main menu and now we can start adding items yes you can add different types of items posts and pages but also categories and tags and custom links you can select any post or page or category or tag that you've created so far in our case that's not much creating content is something we're going to tackle later later in this course but I've created some pages without telling you yeah sneaky I know but with these Pages we can create a basic menu of course I want to link to my homepage then let's add this page with an overview of our posts everything that we've written so far that's always good what is this blog about is of course an important page and the only other page that we have here right now is the sample page but we're going to delete this page in the future so I will not include it in the menu so now we have a really basic menu you can also reorder the items by drag and drop or with these little arrows and it's not only up and down but you can also add some hierarchy here like this that's enough for now we'll come back to menus and it becomes a little predictable later in this course what's next widgets lets you add useful little elements to your page such as search bar recent posts tag cloud and much more we'll look at witchet in depth in the next lesson but you can already see them down here we have some standard ones like search recent posts recent comments archives categories and meta and if you want to add a new one you can do that here then what's left here are the homepage settings here you can select whether you want your blog post to show up on your homepage or a static landing page right now we don't have a suitable static page but we could select a sample page to see what it looks like aesthetic landing page could be useful if your site is for example about promoting a brand or an event or if you're selling a product then you want a nice looking page that introduces the visitor to your brand event or product but since every day I'm traveling is a Blog we want the blog post to appear on the homepage and so we won't have to change this setting finally additional CSS lets you add your own code to style specific elements on the page if you cannot style them with the customizer this is for more advanced users so we won't discuss it in this beginner's course so those are the default options in the customizer but as I've said before additional options may appear down here depending on which theme you're using you may also notice some pencil icons in your website preview these are shortcuts to open the settings for this specific element such as the menu or the site Identity or if we scroll down again each of these widgets has its own shortcut as well so that's very convenient okay and let's not forget this very important but button over here any changes you make in the customizer will not be visible to your visitors until you click publish so feel free to experiment changes can even be scheduled to go live at some point in the future just like posts but for now let's click publish and take a look at our website you can close the customizer by clicking the X in the left corner and here we see that on our live website we now have the logo the menu and the new colors so while the customizer is useful to quickly adjust the basic styling of your site it doesn't yet let you change the entire layout of your post and Pages WordPress is working on that functionality but for now you will have to use the post or page editor which we will discuss wait for it later in this course if you really want to create a theme that fits your exact needs and you know how to write HTM ml CSS and PHP you can create your own themes we won't discuss this in this course but any good WordPress developer for hire should be able to do this you can consider doing this if you want to take your side to the next level but with all the themes available in the WordPress themes directory combined with the power of the customizer you should definitely be able to find something that suits your needs in the previous lessons we've discussed theme and the WordPress customizer in this lesson we'll talk about another aspect of customizing your site widgets a WordPress widget is a simple pre-built block you can add to your site that serves a specific function okay that sounds really abstract let's just take a look at some widgets like the search bar widget if you add the search bar widget to your sidebar your visitors will be able to search the pages on your site that's great right and it's really really simple to add which you'll see in the upcoming screencast that's the magical widgets your site gets a little something special without too much hassle even if you're not very technical and you don't know how to code you can add lots of functionality to your site simply by adding widgets and you have tons of widgets that do all kinds of different things that may be convenient for your site like showing a list of your most recent posts or an image or an audio player much more with these widgets you can give your site the look and feel you prefer and make your website more suitable to the content you want to offer we'll go into several types of widgets in a bit but let's focus on the Practical applications first so where can you place these widgets on your site well you can't just randomly put widgets anywhere widgets can only be put into so-called widget areas these areas are defined by your theme and are usually located in the sidebar and the footer of your site which also means that widgets often appear sitewide so across several Pages however some themes don't include any widget areas so if you want to use widgets it's wise to check this When selecting a theme now on to the types of widgets that are available to you WordPress offers a selection of useful widgets by default let's take a look at the most used ones in detail first of all the text widgets this is the most versatile default widgets because it allows you to add nearly anything to one of your sit's widget areas this could be a Simple Text a collection of links or a media file second there's a Search widget this widget adds a fully functional search bar to your site which helps your visitors to easily find what they're looking for on your site third there's a recent post widget and as the name already implies this widget adds a list of your most recent posts to your site so your visitors will be encouraged to read more of your latest content other default widgets are for example the recent comments widgets the archives widgets the categories widgets the calendar widgets and the gallery widgets we'll go into these widgets in more detail in the reading materials most of these widgets allow you to enter a title and tweak a few basic settings when adding a widget we recommend commend you to look through these options and make sure they match your needs in a screencast in this lesson we'll show you how you can add a widget to your site and set the options in addition to the default widgets there are non-default third-party widgets as well created by the WordPress Community these widgets allow you to personalize your site even more firstly some themes offer additional widgets beside the default ones for example a theme dedicated to selling products in an online store will most likely offer a most popular products widget that you can place on your site secondly lots of plugins add widgets that help you enhance your site there are a number of plugins that add a new widget or a bundle of widgets to your dashboard for example there's a plugin that allows you to add social media sharing buttons and icons as a widget on your site we'll go into the plugins where to find them and how to install them in the next lesson in this module hi in the previous video we explained what widgets are now in this screencast I'm going to show you how to publ change or remove a widget in the WordPress backhand you can find your widgets through the widget menu page obviously but also through the customizer let's first go to the widget menu page by clicking the appearance menu item here you'll find an overview of the widgets and the widget areas that are available for your theme widget areas are the areas where you can place widgets in our case that's a footer menu let's move from back end to front end to see what it looks like let's move down to the footer menu now let's go back and let's try to add a new widget for example the Search widget over here this one now to insert a new widget drag it from the left side into a widget area on the right you can see empty blocks appear as soon as you hover above the fo footer menu now drop your widget and the widget is immediately saved if we switch back to the front end of the website and move to the bottom of the page our Search widget is shown here now let's say you want to change a widget let's go back to the back end click the widget you want to change for example it folds open with options that you can fill in select or change for example let's add a title to the Search widget let's call it search oh then click save and you're done if we switch back to the front end we see that the widget now has indeed a title search of course you can also remove widgets click the widget you want to get rid of in this case we're going to delete the Search widget click delete and you're done and you can also remove widgets by dragging them out of the widget area and dropping them at the left like this you can also manage your widgets through the customizer over here the same spot where you can change the look and feel of your theme this way you can check how your change looks before you publish the changes to access the widgets in the customizer select widgets in the left side barar now let's add a new one here click add a widget and then select the widget you would like to add and again I would like to add add the Search widget the widget now opens in the sidebar and you can also check how it looks over here here it is you can modify the widget your likings directly in the sidebar or by clicking the pencil icon let's add the title what are you looking for to see how it looks if you're satisfied click publish and if you're not change it again and then hit publish now to remove a widget click it click remove and publish that's it not that difficult right as I said before different themes come with different widget options and different widget areas now I'm going to change the theme to show you what I mean let's go back to themes and activate this one then go to widgets well this theme offers more widget op options and more widget areas and of course it's up to you to find out what fits your site we haven't discussed plugin so far but they can provide you with more widget options as well take our local SEO plugin for example this plugin is meant for people who own a small local business like a bakery or a painting company it's not useful for our example site every day I'm traveling since that is not a local business but I've installed it anyway just to show you the extra widgets that come with it as you can see here these widgets help you to enhance want your contact page because people searching for stores nearby want to find directions a map and a route opening hours and contact details like an address phone number or email address again it's up to you to find out what fits your site so go and explore in this video we're going to discuss something that can really unlock a lot of the power of Wordpress plug PLS plugins are extra pieces of software that you install to add extra features and functionality to your WordPress site they allow you to go beyond what a basic WordPress installation has to offer in a way a default WordPress installation is very like a phone on factory settings it has a number of things pre-installed which are very valuable and cover the core of what a phone needs to do but often you want more you want things that are specifically useful to you to do that you install the apps you like and need with WordPress plugins are just like those extra apps that you install to be able to do all kinds of different things they allow you to use WordPress to its full and most customized potential and just like there are apps for anything and everything there are over 50,000 WordPress plugins that all do different things too many to go through in detail here there are plugins that help you rank in search engines or set up an online shop or help improve performance the Poss possibilities are countless we'll give you a more specific idea of what plugins can do as we explore them in a bit more detail later in this video but first let me spend a couple more minutes on what you should look out for When selecting and installing plugins it's really important not to just download and install every plugin that seems vaguely useful don't install plugins from sources you don't trust for example remember you're adding the plugin to your own website which can leave all kinds of doors open for abuse and there are are malicious plugins out there that you definitely want to stay away from plugins that are available through the WordPress backend and on wordpress.org can generally be trusted but trustworthiness isn't the only issue quality is obviously important as well you want to be sure that the plug-in you install does exactly what you want it to do and does it well and don't be fooled it's perfectly possible that a lot of available plugins don't do a great job or simply don't match your website's needs it's not as simple as I'll install a security tool and my security is taken care of and performance is a complex issue as well just like your phone slows down when you install too many slow apps or too many apps plugins can bug down your website moreover some plugins actively offer support where others hang you out to dry so in short you want to install a limited number of plugins that fit your needs and do what you need them to do obviously that requires some research and potentially some tough choices so let's explore what plugins can do in more detail let's take a very quick look at what our own yast SEO plugin does to illustrate the added value of plugins once you install and activate your SEO a number of things change in your WordPress installation for one you get some additional settings that help you configure your site more specifically than the default ones can secondly some elements of your pages and sites are improved automatically as the plug-in ads code that helps search engines to understand it and most notably you can optimize your posts and cont content with added functionality that shows up when you're writing a post there are also plugins that help you speed up your website for example they may store data in a cache which makes sure that Pages load faster for returning visitors or they make your files smaller so that they load more quickly other plugins May filter out spam comments so that you don't have to or secure your website for malicious software with things like firewalls or security improvements on top of the default login system other plugins might allow you to set up an online store to sell your products or completely change the look and feel of your website or help you publish your pages in different languages to make a long story short there are tons of plugins that you can download and install which do tons of useful things we've chosen not to discuss specific plugins beside our own in this course because there are just too many and we don't want to play favorites too much just know that it's really worthwhile to check whether there are any plugins that could make your life easier chances are there will be loads of them just click plugins in the admin menu and you'll have access to a huge list that you can check out and explore clicking on the plug-in name triggers a popup in which you'll find a description of what the plug-in does including reviews do note though the list of plugins you'll find there isn't complete the plugins you'll find there are all free there are also loads of paid plugins around the web our y SEO premium plug-in for example can't be found through the WordPress search engine nor can several other useful plugins that can definitely make life much easier for you so it's worth taking a deep dive into any plugins that can Kickstart your website lastly it's also very important to regularly update your plugins plugins can become security risks if you don't manage them properly many plugins routinely fix security risks in new updates so updating them regularly is really important we'll come back to this in the lesson on WordPress updates later in this course that's it for the theory of plug in the upcoming screencast we'll show you exactly how to install activate and manage your plugins right from the WordPress back end hi there and welcome back now that you know what plugins are let's see how you can use them in WordPress you can install plugins in three ways from the WordPress plugin repository that you can access from the back end by uploading a previously downloaded plugin or by using FTP in this video I will tell you how to install plugins via the plugins menu item in your backhand and I will also tell you how you can manage your plugins once they are installed in the next video we'll show you how to upload a plugin we will not install plugins via FTP in this course since that's a bit more advanced now let's begin once you are in your back end go to the plugins menu item in the admin menu if you want to immediate medely add a new plugin select the add new tab if you want to go to the overview of the plugins you already have just click the plugins menu item right here as you can see the plug-in screen is empty that's because I've cheated a bit I've installed the Y SEO premium and the local SEO plugin to show you some widgets in the previous lesson but I've deleted them afterwards so that we can start from scratch in this screencast so let's do that you can add a new plugin by clicking on the add new button what you see here is the WordPress plug-in repository with many plugins to choose from that's nice right but it's important to note that only free and approved plugins like y SEO can be found in the repository that means that there are also plugins that you could use that are not included here like your SEO premium no worries if you want to use a plugin that's not in the repository you can install them yourself we'll show you how in the next video back to the repository in the top menu you can choose plugins from different categories the search bar allows you to quickly search for a plugin you can search either for a particular Plugin or base on a keyword let's see what happens if we type in yast voila here's the free yast SEO plugin let's quickly scan the information here in the Y plug-in box you can see the name of the plugin and you can also see a short description reviews and the latest update most importantly and this is something you should pay attention to you see whether the plug-in is compatible with the version of Wordpress you are using in this case you can see that y SEO is compatible with this version it's important to always check the compatibility to ensure that your plugins work optimally if you want to know more about the plugin click on the more details link or on the name a new window will pop up and you will see a lot more information by the way different plugins organize their information differently so do not expect to see exactly the same format for all so once you have checked all the information and you are satisfied with what the plugin has to offer you want to install it that's easy simply click on the install now button once the installation is done you will receive a message that the plug-in was successfully installed however simply installing the plugin is not enough step two is to activate it so click on the activate button you will see the plug-in screen appear the Yos SEO plugin is now installed and activated you can see that two new Yos SEO menu items were created here in the admin menu and in the toolbar the location of the plug-in menu items will of course differ per plug-in and some will also have no visible menu items at all now that we have installed our plugin let's go back to the plug-in screen and see what other options there are once you have more plugins you will see more options here such as inactive recently active or updates available just below the links there's the bulk actions menu this menu gives you the option to activate deactivate update and delete multiple plugins at once to apply one of these actions you will need to take the box next to the plug-in name select an action for example deactivate and then click on the apply button deactivating will turn the plugin off and it will no longer function but it will still be installed and available once you need it again this allows you to switch a plugin on and off as you see appropriate you can now see that the plugin has been deactivated and that the options you have are to activate or delete note that you can only delete a plugin once it is deactivated that's it you now know how to install and manage your plugins good luck in this video we will see how to upload a plugin that you previously downloaded on your computer the plugins that you can find in the WordPress plug-in repository as we already mentioned are always free if you want to use a paid Plugin or a plugin that is not featured in the WordPress repository you will need to download it from an external site for example the Y SEO plug-in has a premium version after you have purchased the SEO premium you will be able to download the zip file containing the plug-in data I have already previously downloaded the file so we can move straight to uploading it to Wordpress We Begin by clicking the plugins menu item in the admin menu then we click on the add new button that takes us to the add plugin screen you can see that in this screen at the very top is the upload plug-in button we click the button and the screen expands here we can upload the US SEO premium zip file we previously downloaded now know that there is only an option to upload a file in zip format if your plugin is downloaded in another format you will need to contact your plug-in provider and ask for assistance in this case Yost SEO premium is neatly packaged so we can easily proceed I choose the file from the downloads folder I press open and then install now now we wait for the installation to progress and once it is done we will be taken to a new screen that informs us that the plugin was installed successfully now the next step as we already previously mentioned is to activate the plugin so we press activate plugin the plug-in is now successfully activated and installed and we can see that the Yos SEO icon appears both in the admin menu and the toolbar of course as I already previously mentioned where the plugin icons appear will differ per plugin and some plugins will have no icons at all the remaining options for editing deactivating or deleting the plug-in remain the same as we discussed in the previous video so that's it we are now ready to install plugin both through the WordPress plugin repository and upload plugins that you have previously downloaded hey in a previous video we saw what plugins are and how you can install them we dedicate this video to a particular type of Wordpress plugins page Builders how come these plugins get special treatment well because as a beginner the chance that you will stumble upon the term page builder is quite High We want to make sure you understand what they are so let's roll up our sleeves and start learning don't let the name fool you page Builders are not some super complicated things only developers understand they are quite simple to use that is why they are popular among WordPress users a page builder is a plugin that lets you easily structure and design your sites Pages it does this with a special visual editor what's so special about it well if you install a page builder plug-in you will likely need to replace the default WordPress page or post editor with the page builder visual editor all of this may still sound abstract to you so let's look at some examples there are a lot of website Builders out there a very popular one is Elementor the basic version of this plugin is available for free there's a paid pro version available too which offers more features and templates here is how it works after you install and activate the plugin you won't see immediate changes but when you open the page or post editor you will see this button click on the button and you will access elementor's Visual editor you can use the visual blocks drag and drop them to your page or post and build content that way the visual editor allows you to play around and create content just as you want it the visual editor is also a live preview so anything you create will appear on your website just as you see it in the editor another popular page builder plugin Beaver Builder Works similarly when you open your page editing screen this plug-in will also allow you to choose where you edit your content choose the beaver Builder and you will edit with its visual editor again you can drag and drop to your hearts delight and build the page of your dreams but not all page Builders work like this for example another widely used page builder is dy this one works a bit differently because it's part of the elegant themes membership package elegant them develops WordPress themes such as DV yes DV is both a theme which includes the Page Builder and a separate page builder plug-in unlike the other two there are only page versions for this page builder and the price depends on the package you get okay now now that you understand page Builders let's dig a bit deeper into their usefulness like most things in life there is a positive and a negative side to using page Builders let's look at the positive one first a big plus with page Builders is that you can build a page without writing a single line of code they're usually straightforward to use and have lots of different options and choices they offer tons of page elements such as a text element video element or an image gallery all you need to do is drag the elements and drop them on your page to sum up page builders make it super easy to build pages and websites that sounds great why would there be a negative side page Builders allow you to do a lot without looking into code and that is where things may sometimes go wrong there are indeed many elements you can add to a page with a page builder as a result of that it's simply too easy to make heavy Pages something we see often that can slow down your site which can affect your SEO negatively so if you use a page builder do make sure you test your site and make sure it stays fast now you know what page build Builders are how they work and what you need to consider before using them stick around for the next module where we will see how you can start writing and editing your content this module is all about how to create content that you can display on your site but before we start doing that we need to know what types of content there are so let's review by default WordPress has two major content types posts and Pages they look very similar both in the back end and on your actual website but what sets them apart well it has to do with the role that the content you want to write will play on your site there are a number of things that set pages and posts apart which will discuss one by one in this video firstly posts our content where the time of the publication is relevant for Pages the publication date doesn't really matter to really understand this let's remember what WordPress started as a blogging platform on a Blog there is a clear distinction between these types of content on one hand you have blog posts which you write and put up with a certain regularity they need to be fresh and current and to reflect what's happening in the world right now this also means that as time passes they may become less relevant or less accurate like if we're writing an article on how Google understands text that might be completely different in 5 years we'll have to edit that post or write a new one to show how it works then so post show what something is or was like at a point in time on the other hand your website also has a number of pages that are basically static and not subject to the passage of time like this arts and crafts page where we put up some coloring pages and other creative stuff for children to enjoy nobody cares when this was published and it won't be less useful 5 years from now the same goes for our yo plug-in product page it's simply not very relevant when a product was first launched for the visitors to that page of course you still have to manage these pages and you may want to make regular changes over time but pages are just not as fleeting or as temporal as blog posts are a second difference is the fact that for posts it can matter who wrote the content visitors want to know who wrote a post so when our founder yalk writes an article on technical SEO for example people know they can trust what he's saying moreover posts are often written from a more personal perspective for Pages the author is much less relevant we don't display authors on our product pages or our about us page for example because who wrote that page doesn't really matter to visitors that's why WordPress displays authors on posts but not on pages thirdly posts are archived in WordPress whereas Pages aren't you can show your recent blog posts for example in a widget you also have pages that show Archives of posts within certain blog categories or within certain tags we'll come back to that in the next module but your most recent posts show up at the top here as well so again there's the element of time and recency lastly posts are meant to spark interaction your users can comment on posts whereas they can't comment on pages this makes a lot of sense when we look at the examples we discussed earlier comments make sense on informational blog posts or personal experiences where you can have a discussion about something you think differently about that doesn't really make sense on pages so on pages comments are disabled by default in WordPress well there you have it four important differences between posts and Pages the easiest way to remember it is probably that the content of posts can become outdated as the world or your perspective on the world can change whereas Pages only need to be updated when you change something about how your website or your business works so let's categorize some types of content when should you use posts and when should you use Pages well just to give you an idea these types of content are usually posts blog posts obviously news articles announcements think pieces essays tutorials interviews personal stories and case studies and these types of content are usually Pages product information FAQs terms of use privacy Pages partner information about us pages and contact Pages there are a lot more possibilities but I'm sure you get the point now on to the next video in which we show you exactly how to write your posts and pages in this video we'll get to the most exciting thing in WordPress and see how you actually write a post I'm going to show you how to write a post but it works exactly the same for pages so no worries there the only differences are in the options in the sidebar which will explore in the screencast about the sidebar in this same module to start writing click on post and then the add new button you'll end up on a screen that gives you a whole lot of options especially if you've already installed some plugins they may occupy some space as well but let's ignore all of these things and focus on the big block of white space in the middle that's where you're going to write your post the first thing you need to do is already laid out for you add a title enter the title of the post you want to create and in our case st's top tourist attractions in able and now you're going to have to make the first of many decisions whether to start writing or use a Blog so what are blogs well everything you do in the post editor is divide it up into a Blog in its simplest form a Blog can be a paragraph a Blog can be a heading as well but a Blog can be an image with a caption or video or all kinds of interesting things we're going to go into these interesting things more in detail in a later screencast for now let's first write a little introduction to the article for example I will put this text now I want this introduction to be in italics to do that I simply double click on the text to select it and click the I right above the text text I can also put the text in bold you can also align the text left Center or right as you see here or you can add a link to a part of your text on the far left you can also transform the block into another type like if I want to start with a quotation I could use the quote block here and transform the introduction into a quote but I don't want to do that actually so let's change it back to a simple paragraph there's also a more options option on the far right this allows you to duplicate the blog insert another blog before or after this blog and to edit the blog as HTML if you want to do some fancy HTML stuff you probably won't need to use these options very often once you finished your introduction simply press enter and you'll automatically create a new blog now I want to discuss three hotspots in esto in my article so it makes sense to create a heading for every one of them headings show your readers what's coming and allow them to scan quickly to see whether the content is interesting for them so let's create a heading for the first hotspot we're going to discuss the a sopia click the little plus symbol on the left right here and add a heading block as you can see you can create an H2 H3 or H4 that's because the H1 is always the title of the page headings show hierarchy so we're going to use H2 for every hotspot because all of them are equally important to our article so let's type in a Sophia here and press enter to create another paragraph now let me just copy paste the rest of the sample article in to save us all time if you're copy thing from another source always check to see whether it all works in this case it works fine so that's nice now say that you want to switch around two of the paragraphs you've written because that would be better for the article that's very easy to do just select the paragraph you want to move then hover over it and then click one of the arrows you see on the left of the Block they'll move up and down accordingly and if you want to remove a block just select the text and then press backspace if you want to remove several blocks at once you can simply select them and again press backspace let's just undo this and return to our original article okay so now we've got a complete post with an introduction three hotspots and a conclusion of course if I were to write a real article it would probably be a lot longer but this was just to illustrate how writing a post Works once you've finished your post you can save it as a draft here or publish it at the top right of your screen if you publish the post visitors on your site will be able to see and read it so don't do this unless you're sure you feel good about the post before you publish it's always smart to preview what your post looks like on your actual site I've stuck to the basics here but if you're doing more fancy things which we're going to do in the upcoming screencast you'll always want to check whether everything shows the way you want it to to do this you go to the top right corner of your screen and click preview WordPress will generate a preview of what the page will look like and that's it now you are ready to start writing your first post now that you've seen how to create posts in this video I will show you how to add images to a post first I want to add an image below the a sopia paragraph to do that I click enter below the paragraph to create a new blog and then I click on the plus button here and choose the image blog this is the image blog where you can add images in four different ways you can upload an image selected from the media library insert an image from a URL or drag and drop an image into the box let's try the upload load option first I click on upload and a dialogue box will open where you can choose an image that is stored on your computer I find the image I want to use I select it and then click open and the image is now added to the text below the image there is the option to write a caption all you need to do is type in the text on the right side you see a sidebar with more settings for adjusting the image the first thing you can do is add alternative text alternative text describes your image to people who cannot see it for example this can help visually impaired people who may be using screen readers to understand what your text is about alternative text also helps search engine spiders find your relevant content and thus improve the accessibility of your site next in the sidebar you can change the image size by either choosing a generic image size or by choosing the exact image Dimensions yet another way to change the image Dimension is straight into the blog click on the image and you will see blue dots appear on the edges use the left Mouse button to click on a DOT and simply drag it to a size that you find suitable note that you will need to see the cross Arrow appear for this to work let's go back to the sidebar and its settings below the resizing settings are the link settings they allow you to make your image clickable and to choose what happens when visitors click on it you will see an example of that when we add an image from URL and back to the editor again right now we have the image below the paragraph but there are various alignment manipulations that you can use for example you can move the image between the paragraph and the heading to do that select the image hover the mouse over the left side of the image until you see two arrows appear click on the upward pointing arrow and you see that the image is now between the title and the paragraph there are also other options for aligning the image with the text I will click this one for example and then by clicking holding and moving the image with the blue dots I can change it to a size that I desire okay now we have the image set in the text but there are other options to edit it even more first we can transform the image by clicking on the transform button here and these are the options you can turn an image into a downloadable file but that will make it go away and in this case we do not want that we can add some more text Associated to the image and even choose to add a heading a list or a paragraph This also does not seem suitable for this kind of post I think the most interesting here and most relevant is the option to add a gallery so I click on it and now you see the new Option here to upload another image within this blog I will upload one and you see now that the settings in the sidebar are changed currently I have two columns so two images that I can add to the gallery but I can also add more columns by changing the number here you can also choose to crop the thumbnails so they align and choose to link to them if you choose the option link to media file the images will be clickable and they will open in another screen I click save draft and preview to see what the gallery looks like you see it here and I click on the image to open it going back to the editing screen there is the option to transform the image into a cover image I will choose that option and you see now that there is a possibility to write text over the image let's write turkey top destinations and let's click on the Arrow here to move the image up and know that now there are options in the sidebar that are again different now I can change the background the colors and the brightness of this cover image so let me just adjust a few things click save draft and then preview to see what happened here it is the image is now displayed as a cover I go back and you see here that in the menu there are three dots that offer even more options available for manipulating this blog you can for example duplicate this photo choose to add another blog before or after it and you can also add it to reusable blogs if you have an image that you use often click on the add to reusable blocks add a title and click save you can now find your reusable blog by clicking the plus icon scroll through the bottom of the drop- down menu and click on the reusable block you created finally if you want to delete the block choose the remove block option as I mentioned previously there are different ways to add images with the block editor we already uploaded one and the image we uploaded went straight to our media library you can also directly upload files in the media library like this finally there is also an option to edit the image via the media Library just below the image and its details there is the edit image link click on it and a new screen in a new tab will open here we can crop rotate and flip the image around we can also change the dimensions the name Etc if you make any changes here do not forget to click update in order for them to work let's go back to our post editor if you want to insert an image from an external site or from a URL without adding it to the media library you can do it with the insert from URL button go to the image page Source in this case I have found a page with images from Turkey right click on the desired image and choose copy image URL go back to the post editor simply paste the link and click the enter button and the image is now set now since we took this image from a different site we want to make it clickable and enable visitors to access the original image source to do that we go to the link settings then choose the link to custom URL and in the link URL box here we paste the URL of the image source like this I will also choose to open the image in a new tab once it is clicked let's now click save then preview and here we see that the image is clickable and if I click on it the source URL opens in a new tab let's go back and see one more final option to add an image which is the drag and drop option you drag and drop an image from your computer by first locating the image on the computer left click on it to select it and simply drag it and drop it here like this and there there it is those are the basics of what you can do to add and edit images previously we saw how to add images to a text but what about videos or other types of content that's also easy and to show you how I created this new heading in our post here videos can be added in two ways either from your own library or videos that you have made yourself or you can also add videos that you find on external sites note that uploading videos to your directory especially big ones may slow down your site traffic and cause issues for the user experience to save yourself this trouble you may want to consider uploading your videos on YouTube or a similar platform and linking from there let's first see how you can upload videos click on the plus icon to add a new type of block it may happen that you do not see the video option among these first options if so you can quickly search for it in the search bar here by typing video and here it is click on it and now there is a block in the editing screen similarly to the images you can upload a video add it from the media library and insert it from a URL click on the upload button to reveal the dialogue box where you can search for your video select it and click open and the video is now in the post let's explore the options in the sidebar you can choose to let the video automatically play When the post is open but this is not something that we would recommend you can choose for it to go in a loop that is to say to replay every time it reaches the end you can also mute it and allow or disallow playback options which means that the visitors will be able to rewind forward pause play Etc note that you cannot click on the video here within the editor but only when you preview the post you can also choose an image the video could start with click on the option here and choose the image from the media library or upload a new one if you want to Let's click save and check how the video appears in the post here it is this is what your visitors will be able to see and do with the video let's go back and see the remaining options we see that the options we have here for the video are similar as for the images to quickly recap you can add a caption change the type of block align the video to fit the text as you want edit it insert paragraphs or blocks reuse it or remove it okay let's see how to add a video from URL now let's open another video box here for example you can add a video from YouTube by simply copying and pasting the link from a video like this alternatively if you want to add a video from another site you can use the Eds instead of videos adding a video from YouTube is easy but it may be slightly more complicated from other sites for example from Ted let's press enter here and click on the plus button where we can find the embeds in the embeds you can see the icon of the most popular websites that you can embed content from for example let's see how a TED video would be embedded click on the Ted icon I conveniently have a Ted Page open here now note this is a whole page with a video but also all kinds of other content yet if I use the embed option the main video will automatically be extracted and shown on my page I copy the link go back to the editor paste it and there it is now the option for editing embedded content in the sidebar are limited and I can only choose for the video to automatically resize in relation to the browser size or the device my visitors are using let's save and preview how this looks like on the site here it is just the video extracted from the other content of the Ted page besides videos we can also embed other types of content like images tweets as well as links to entire posts with previews so I can embed a relevant Reddit post within my own post by choosing Reddit from the embeds menu and just copying and pasting the link to the post and it will appear in my post like this again with embeds of any type just like with the videos the options I have is to allow to resize when the browser is resized and that's it we have shown you how to add images videos and embeds to the post and you are now ready to do it yourself in this video we will explore blocks we will continue in the same post as before with the difference that I have removed the other bonus content to make space for the new one as you already mentioned blogs can be various content elements that you add to your posts and Pages we already saw how to add text images videos and embeds those are the most used blogs but there are more interesting things you can add let's click on the plus icon to see what kind of other blogs there are the list is long and to make things easier it is divided into different main headings first are the most used which show the blog you use most frequently or most recently under the common blog stab we see some familiar blogs such as the paragraph image cover heading gallery and video we have not yet explored the file quote list and audio let's go through them one by one first we can add a file to a post for example you may want to add a downloadable PDF you can do that by clicking on the file block and the block with the options will appear just like with the other blocks you can upload drag and drop or use the media library to add a file let's upload a PDF by clicking the upload button and choosing a PDF document from the computer the PDF file is now uploaded as a clickable link with the same title that the PDF document has the options I have now in the sidebar are to link to the media file or an attachment page page choose the link to media file option if you want the visitors to directly open or download the file by clicking on the file link or the download button in the sidebar we also have the option to open the document in a new tab once a visitor clicks it as well as the option to hide the download button I will select the open in a new tab option only click save and then preview to see what happens you can see that the link now appears here it is clickable and when clicked it opens in a new tab while when the download button is clicked the document is downloaded alternatively you can choose to link to attachment page let's do it and click preview to see what happens now that we link to the attachment page here you see that clicking on the link first opens a new page with a preview of the document clicking on the document will only open it but not download it okay that was the file block and let's now move on to the other common block which is the quote block use this block to add some style to your quotes I will click on it and now I have the option to add some text in this case I have a quote about asemble ready I will copy and paste it into the blog I will click save draft and preview to see what it looks like this this is what the quote appears like on the page the quote can either be regular like it is now or large like this in addition there is one more option to change the quote a bit more in the editor toolbar you can see the quote icon click on it and choose the pull quote option now you see that you can add some lines around the quote and here you can change the text color or even add a solid color block around the quote let's go to the next common block which is the list just click on the list block and you will see a bullet point appear in the editor and now you can start typing the list if you want you can change the bullet points into numbers by selecting the numbers option here finally in the common block stab is the audio block you can see the options here are the same as we saw with the other media types I will choose to upload a random audio file just to show you what it will look like and now you see once I uploaded it a simple audio player is embedded the options in the sidebar are to autoplay Loop and preload there is no option to change the look of this audio player now you know the most common and most useful blocks you can read and learn more about all the blocks in the reading material provided in this module so I am sure you noticed that there are plenty of ways you can edit style and enhance your text with the block editor go ahead and explore experiment and see what works for you have fun welcome back now you've just explored some really useful blocks then why another video is there more to explore yes there is in this screencast I would like to draw your attention to one more block option and a very useful one reusing blocks we mentioned it briefly in the previous video If you create a new block you can also save it as a reusable block just click the three dots and then add to reusable blocks enter a name here and it's always smart to think of a name that helps you identify the block especially when you're planning to save lots of reusable blocks now click save if you want to use it again you can find it under the reusable tab now why or when would you reuse a block well for example if you have a Blog and you want readers to follow you on let's say Twitter you could end your post with an extra piece of text something like this let me just style it a bit you could use this end line for almost any post and instead of typing it again for every post you can make it a reusable block and edit in one click saves you a lot lot of time and the same goes for call to action buttons like this one buy our ebook and then add a color and add a link now you don't want to style a button over and over again and you don't have to just create it once and then reuse it you could do the same for size tables or feedback forms or whatever you think is useful for your site okay now if you decide to edit a reusable block and this is very important then this block will change everywhere for example if you change the color of this reusable button it will turn into yellow on all the pages where you've used it that will save you a lot of time but sometimes you don't want all buttons to change sometimes you just want to change a color link or some words for one specific post and if that's what you want then you should convert your reusable block into a regular block before you edit it so add a reusable block click the three dots and and then click convert to regular block and once it is regular you can make your changes now the Chang will only apply to this block we've discussed the most important information about reusable block so far but I would like to mention one more thing you can manage all your reusable blocks in one place click the reusable Tab and then click this link here hey this looks familiar it's an overview here here you can edit or delete your blocks and you can export them if you have more than one word peress site you can use your reusable blocks there as well simply import your export file by clicking this button you can now use your reusable block on your other side as well really cool right in this screencast we will explore the functions that are available in the sidebar in the previous videos we frequently use the sidebar to make adjustments to the individual blocks but note that the sidebar actually has two tabs block and document so far we use the block tab which was different for every block let us now look at the document tab in the sidebar which contains settings for the post as a whole the first tab is the status and visibility and the first thing you can do here is determine the visibility of your post you can set the visibility by clicking on the public link it will open a fly out menu with the options public private and password protected determine the visibility by clicking on one of the options and finish the action by clicking anywhere outside the menu second you can choose when to publish the post immediately or schedule a different posting time and date to pick a posting time and date click on the link here a fly out menu appears where you can insert the desired time and date once you have selected the date simply close the menu by clicking anywhere outside of the menu the stick to the top of the blog option allows for the selected post to appear first even if you post other newer content after publishing it note that if you select this you will be able to preview the change only once you actually publish the post so we'll select it now and we will see how it will be displayed once the post is published the pending review option will Mark the post as pending instead of as draft not that if I select this option the save link at the top changes from Save draft to save as pending the pending status will also appear in the post overview as you can see if I go to the Post overview screen if you have more users of your page you will be able to choose who the author of the post this by clicking on this menu the final option in in the status invisibility tab allows you to delete the draft by clicking on the move to trash button the next settings in the sidebar allow you to view your previous revisions click on it and a new screen will open at the center of the screen you see the before and after versions of the revision to view when a revision was made and by whom click and hold the arrows here while sliding the mouse left or right you see the different changes appear at the breaking points of the slide bar to restore a previous version drag the arrow to the desired point and then click on the restore this revision button moving on in the sidebar next comes the permal link tab in order to tell you about permal links I will also use the categories stab here in the sidebar if you remember we already picked the basic URL structure for our posts which was the site name followed by the category and then the post name you see here that we have the basic structure set since we do not have any categories created the post is in the uncategorized category we will tell you more about the theory and practice of categories in the next module for now instead of leaving this post uncategorized we can actually quickly create a category here in the sidebar if you want to add a new category simply click on the add new category link add the category name and if necessary reassign a parent category then click the add new category button and it's done I will now select this category for the post and click save and you now see that the category is changed here in the peral link as previously mentioned the basic perling structure in this case categories and post name is something we will not change since it may lead to errors what we can change is the last part of the URL which is the post title the basic structure will stay the same of course we will still have the countries followed by the post tile however we can make changes to the post tile itself for example if the title seems too long we can shorten it by removing some of the words like this it is important to mention that once you publish the post with this particular URL you should no longer change it if you do change it the post will be published on multiple Pages which will lead to errors and consequences for the findability of your post okay now that we saw both permal links and categories we can move on to the next setting tags to add a tag simply type it in the add new tag box note that you need to press the enter button on your keyboard after each tag you add for it to be added in the next setting in the sidebar you can add a feature featured image to your post click on the set featured image button you can either upload a new photo or choose one from the media library I will choose this one and click select you now see the image in the sidebar to see what the image looks like in the post I will click on Save and then preview and you see that the image is automatically set as a cover for this post moving on in the sidebar you can determine the content of the post excerpt this refers to the excerp that will be shown when your post appears in an RSS feed and if your team supports it it can also appear in other places that allow quick summaries for example in the category archives finally before publishing in the sidebar you can choose to allow or disable comments or allow and disable pingbacks and trackbacks by leaving the Box checked or unchecking it if you're satisfied with everything here it might be wise to first preview the post before publishing it and once you are satisfied with what you see in the preview you can move on and publish by simply clicking the publish button that will trigger a new menu in the sidebar where you can once again check the visibility and the time of publishing the post at the bottom you can choose to always see these checks or skip them in the future all that is left now is to press publish and the post will be live note that even even though your post is now on your site you can still make changes to it you can continue editing as you did before and instead of saving the draft you will need to click update alternatively if you want to temporarily remove the post from your site click on switch to draft which will remove the post until you decide to publish it again let's publish it back again and preview it and this is what the post will look like once I click to read it and if I click on the posts overview I also see that it is featured and that the featured image appears as a cover image there are a few more things to add concerning the sidebar first some plugins for example the Y plugin may also appear in the sidebar and of course depending on the plug-in the options that will appear will differ secondly so far we explored the sidebar in the post editing screen but the sidebar also appears in the pages editing screen let's see it by clicking on the pages menu item and then click on a page you see that the options are actually the same you have the sidebar divided into the document and block tabs the blocks you can add to pages are the same as the ones for post the only difference is that in the document tab of the sidebar there are slightly less options compared to the post and there is one different option here at at the bottom which is the page attributes where you can assign a parent page we will tell you more about parent pages in the next module so that is it about the sidebar you are now ready to publish your first page or post in this lesson we'll explore the various ways of organizing your site within WordPress we'll discuss the ideal way to structure your site your menus your breadcrumbs and lastly categories and tags now let's take a look at how you should organize your size if you're starting from scratch and could create an ideal situation which if you're taking this course May well be the case yay win for you that saves you a whole lot of trouble so what does a well organized website look like we think it looks like a pyramid with a number of levels your homepage is all the way at the top where it's lonely and then you have some category Pages under the homepage you should be able to file all of your content under one of these categories and if your site is larger you'll have some categories that fall under these categories as well WordPress calls the main or top level categories parent categories categories that fall under another category are called a child category for example for y.com the pyramid would look like this our homepage at the top and the category page is yoso plugin SEO courses SEO blog and support under it almost everything we do can be filed under one of these major categories these parent categories have child categories the category page SEO blog for example has child categories for every SEO topic we write about such as analytics for example now under these child categories there's a level with all the individual posts we have on our website so in our case there are four levels homepage parent categories child categories and then regular pages and posts so let's see how this works for every day I'm traveling what might our travel blogs pyramid look like well maybe something like this again the homepage is at the top and then we have to have category pages so what categories make sense we know we have several contributors who travel all over the world so using the continents might make sense in this case so we'd have a category for Europe Africa South America North America Asia and let's call it Australia and New Zealand because that's probably what people will looking for more in Oceania of course these main categories can be divided into child categories as well we'll add child categories for the regions our travel bloggers have visited for example the category Asia includes the child category Central Asia East Asia South Asia southeast Asia and Western Asia now if you want to add another layer you can make these categories parents to even more specific categories so southeast Asia might be a parent of Indonesia for example Asia would be in that case sort of a grandparent to Indonesia Now using consonant as travel blog menu items there just one possibility other configurations might make sense as well if our travel blog were less ambitious we might have just the countries our authors have visited for CH categories and do away with the regions alog together or we could also just as well put all of these categories under one big destinations category and add accommodations travel Essentials and reviews categories it really depends on what you want to do what you want to focus on and discuss on your site and how you can keep your site well balanced so you're going to have to think long and hard about this before you make any decisions for your own site for this example we stick with the consonant approach because our authors mostly write articles that are centered around a destination we'll revisit the topic of categories in the next video but first let's explore the most important part of organizing your site the homepage it goes without saying that your homepage should act as a navigation hub for your visitors you should link to your most important pages from your homepage by doing this your visitors are more likely to end up on the pages you want them to end up on as an added bonus you show Google that these pages are important as well of course if your site gets bigger you won't be able to link from the homepage to all of your important Pages at yast we write about six new articles a week and we have about 16 important main articles we cannot link to all of them from the homepage that will lead to clutter which makes it less likely that your visitors notice the pages you want them to visit in addition to having a well structured homepage it's also important to create a clear navigation path on your entire site your sitewide navigation consists of two main elements the menu and the breadcrumbs first of all the menu the website menu is the most common aid for navigation on your website and you want to make the best possible use of it visitors use your menu to find things on your website it helps them understand the structure of your site and that's why the main categories on your site should all have a place in the menu on your homepage furthermore it's not always necessary to put everything in just one menu if you have a big site with lots of categories this may clutter your website and makes your main menu a poor reflection of the rest of your site where it makes sense it's perfect perfectly fine to create a second menu like the one the Manhattan and college site users on this size the second menu links to Pages aimed at specific audiences but be careful if there's no specific reason on your site to implement a second menu one menu bar is better it maintains Clarity and focus and finally just like on your homepage don't add too many links to your menu the structure of your site can be made even clearer by adding breadcrumbs to your pages breadcrumbs are usually visible above the title of your post they are click appable links that look like this home Europe southern Europe Italy breadcrumbs improve both the user experience as well as the SEO of your blog they show you how the current page fits into the largest structure of your site breadcrumbs allow your users to easily navigate your site and they will help them to find their way if they land directly on a page at a lower level of your pyramid for example via Google moreover they allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily in addition to that Google might use breadcrumbs in the search results now unfortunately WordPress doesn't offer breadcrumbs functionality out of the box but adding breadcrumbs is quite easy if you use a WordPress size you can use one of the many breadcrumbs plugins okay so now you should have a basic idea of how to create the foundation of a well-organized site in the next lesson we'll explore how to build on this Foundation using categories and tags by now you know what a well organized site looks like however we have not yet discussed two major factors in organizing your website categories and tags WordPress uses so-called taxonomies to group content now the word taxonomy is basically a fancy term for a group of things like website pages in this case that have something in common this is convenient because people looking for more information on the same topic will be able to find similar articles more easily and you can group content in different ways and the default taxonomies in WordPress are categories and tags now you may have heard of them but are you using them right let's take a look at categories some things have something in common because they can all be filed under the same category like Canada and the US and the Caribbean are all part of North America for example thus they can be put into the North America category North America is the over arching term and the rest is all part of North America so there's always a certain hierarchy to categories North America is at the top as the main term and the rest is merely one of the parts that together make North America you should divide the blog posts on your site into a number of categories if they grow too big ADD child categories to these categories to clear things up again if you have a large block category like North America for example the us could be added as a child category under which you put all the different travel posts about the US again there's still a certain hierarchy here North America is still at the top but the US is now in the middle rather than at the bottom of the food chain that place is now reserved for the specific articles about the US that fall under that category adding this hierarchy and categorizing your pages helps your user and Google make sense of every single page you write when implementing your category structure make sure to add your main categories to the main menu of your site on a side note if you you're working with pages and not posts this works a little differently posts work with categories and tags whereas Pages don't it's still possible to add hierarchy to pages though to do that you assign a paent page to a page in the sidebar by the way there are also plugins that allow you to add categories and tags to Pages if that's what you prefer back to creating categories though how should you go about this well it's very important that you don't create too many categories or people won't be able to see the wood for the trees it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how many categories you should have a Blog may have a different number of categories than an online shop with all kinds of different products so consider what makes sense for your situation and don't let the number get out of hand also it's generally a good idea to try to make sure that your categories are roughly the same size if one category becomes too large because you have a lot of pages about a certain topic you should divide that category into two categories you can replace the large category by two new on on at the same level like this or you can keep the large category and add to new child categories below like this A good rule of thumb for the size of categories is to make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category it's all about keeping things clear for your visitors and the search engine now once you're satisfied with your structure take a look at the names you have come up with for your categories if you have enough content about a certain subject for it to for it to require its own category you can bet the people people are searching for as well that's why it's very wise to make sure your category names resemble the Search terms people use to find something in Google your side structure will also benefit from adding tags but what's the difference between a category and a tag you may think well the difference has to do with structure and the way you structure things as mentioned before categories are hierarchical you can have child categories and even chart categories to chart categories tags however don't have that hierarchy tags just say hey this article has a certain property that might be interesting for a reader and readers can then use tags to find articles that mention something they're looking for let's go back to our travel blog to illustrate this in addition to the categories on the site we've added tags like City trip Cuisine budget and active to certain articles this makes for example budget holidays easier to find for people who are specifically looking for cheap holidays because those holidays can be found across several different categories and the tags they tie them together you should limit the number of tags you use if you add a new tag to every poster article you're not structuring anything always make sure tags are used more than once or twice on your site if tags are used only once the tag page will be exactly the same as the blog post where you added the tag this may create duplicates or thin content this is bad for your rankings in addition make sure your tags group articles that really have something in common furthermore always make sure your tags are visible to your visitors somewhere preferably at the bottom of your article tags are really useful for your visitors as they enable them to read more about the same topic now the last thing you need to be aware of when creating categories and tags is that every time you create one you'll also create an archive page on your website on this archive page all the posts and Pages within a category tag will be listed and it's important to look at these archive pages and optimize them if your theme allows you to because that can really improve the way your users experience your sites there are other archive Pages besides category and tag Pages like author archives and date archives now that's it for categories and tags now you should have a clear idea of how you should organize your sites to make sure your visitors reach the pages you want them to reach so far we discussed why organizing your site is important now let's see how we actually do that let's start by adding some categories to posts to do that you hover over posts and then click categories if you click it you land on a page where you can create categories I have already added a lot of categories here but there are still a few more left to add I still need to create a category for Australia and New Zealand so let's start by writing the name of the category I will use Australia and New Zealand instead of Oceania and I will add the name right here now below the name you can enter a slug what you enter here is how the category will show up as part of your url so if we enter Australia and New Zealand with hence in between in lower case the URL for every Post in this category will be everyday I'm traveling.com Australia and New Zealand and then the post name remember we already discussed editing permal links let's quickly go back to the permal link screen which I have open here the slug I mentioned will only work if you've added the category value in the peral link settings if you're using the default settings the slug will not work let's go back and we see here that under the slug there's the parent category setting because this page has no parent we leave that untouched for now but we will see how to add a parent category soon below the parent category is the description the description may be shown on category archive pages in certain themes but honestly many themes don't have this setting the default WordPress theme we are working with in this course for example doesn't check for yourself what happens when entering a description and whether you will find it useful if you don't you can just leave this field empty now when you're done filling all this in you click add new category and you will see the category show up in the overview on the right now Australia and New Zealand is one big category so let's divide that into two child categories we will add the child category in the same way as we did the parent category we add a name a here the slug and here in parent category we choose Australia and New Zealand as the parent category and then we just click the add button and you'll see that in the overview on the right Australia is filed under Australia and New Zealand with a line in front of the name to indicate that it is part of the parent category and I will go through the same steps for New Zealand quickly now in the overview here there are also some other options if you hover over a category with the mouse you see that you can edit a category by clicking the edit link and you'll get the same menu you see on the left just on a different screen let's go back to the overview where I will hover the mouse once again to reveal the other options and I see that there is also an option to Quick edit and you see that I am now able to change the name and the slug only you can also delete a category and if you click on The View link you will be taken to the category archive page we will check that out a bit later here you can see the description and the number of posts under a specific category if you find this distracting you can turn them off using the screen options at the top of the page right here and untake the boxes of the options you don't want to see anymore in addition if you'd like to convert some of your categories to tags you can speed up this task using a little tool if you click on the link here note that the page you land on isn't the tool you'll first have to install the converter here once it's installed you can convert categories to tags and vice versa this may be handy and a real timesaver if you're revising your site structure and you think that some of the categories you have work better as tags or the other way around let's now move on to the tags page here there's not really a lot to say it works quite the same as categories only you can't assign parent tags because tags are not hierarchical let's add a new tag to see how it works for example I add the tag Adventure I will add the name the slug and I will click click here and the tag is now added and I can see it in the overview what's left now is to add some posts to a category and to tag them with some tags we will do that by selecting a post from the post screen and click on it and now we will use the sidebar at the right side of the screen here we see the categories and tag settings and I get an overview of all the categories and tags I've set up don't forget you can add posts to multiple categories Istanbul for example is partly located in Europe and Asia so any posts about it should be added to both categories plus Central and Eastern Europe plus Western Asia to confirm your settings it is just a matter of ticking the boxes and updating the post at the top of the page now to organize your pages you need to do something slightly different let's go to the pages screen to see how that works I select the page and here you also go to the sidebar but you won't see categories and tags here you'll just see the option to assign a parent page to the page you're currently editing under page attributes so simply select the page you want the page you're on to fall under and your hierarchy will be set as we mentioned in the video you'll also create an archive page every time you create a category or tag and add post to that category or tag on these archive Pages you'll get an overview of all the posts within that category or tag I will go back to the categories now to show you this here we are now check out this archive page for example for the Central and Eastern Europe category in the standard 2019 theme there's really nothing you can do to optimize these Pages without diving into code in certain other themes you can use the description field we mentioned earlier to spice up these Pages by editing a category you can customize the text and add images and links for example some themes give you even more freedom to customize archive pages so picking a theme that allows you to do what you want to do is really very important here now that I've got my categories and tag set up I want to add some categories in the site menu to do this go to appearance then menus here here you can create a menu the most intuitive way of doing it is by clicking the manage with Life preview option at the top of the page that will take us to the customizer that we already discussed in a previous module in this screen it's very easy to see what you're doing if you don't have any menus yet you'll first have to create one give it a name and decide where it should appear we already have a menu here called menu now let's let's add some menu items are most important categories I will click on ADD items here and as you can see you can automatically select between your pages posts categories and tags let's select some categories for example I will add Africa and Asia all I need to do is click on the cross here and the category will be added you can also see how these appear in the menu at the right side of the screen to save the category in the menu as it appears here click publish and it's done now you can create additional menus as well what options are available to you depends on your team in 2019 you can add a footer menu and a Social Links menu the footer menu appears at the bottom and the Social Links menu appears under the top menu by default in 2017 for example you can add a Social Links menu that shows up at the bottom of your site by default below you can take a box to make sure that the new top level pages are automatically added to the menu this means that anytime you create a page with no parent so this is not a child page to another page it will show up in your menu I'd advise you not to take this box and add pages to the menu yourself and in that way you will have full control so we have reached the end of the screencast and in it we went over how to add categories and tags how to couple them with posts and how to add categories to a menu you can now get to work and create your own website structure to manage your WordPress site especially when working with multiple users WordPress K created a number of user roles let's dive into these roles and see what they can do for you in the first place what are user rules well user rules determine what people can do on your site subscribers can only read things whereas administrators can do almost anything more power also means more risks so administrators can do a lot of great things but they can also Break Stuff keep that in mind when you add new users what do you want a new user to do which user role will suit them best currently WordPress give you five predefined options to choose from you simply click the role you think is best and WordPress takes care of the rest now let's first discuss the five different user roles WordPress offers I'll come back to the Practical part of assigning roles to users in the last part of this video let's start with the most powerful rule the administrator if you've set up a WordPress s for yourself or you're planning to do so this rule will be giving to you automatically it gives you access to all WordPress features like the ability to install or update plugins or to add or remove users most WordPress beginners will have a single sight installation however there is one more user Ro available for multide installations that additional role is called super admin you'll find more information about multide networks and the super admin rule in the reading materials for our example site everyday I'm trving tocom Nora Smith is the admin she added her fellow bloggers are Benjamin Daniel and Taylor as new users they are all assigned to the role of author this role is less powerful than the role of admin but also more focused authors can what a surprise write and publish posts they can only edit publish and delete their own posts and moderate comments on their own posts in our example case that works just fine a five authors all blog about their own travel experiences I is not allowed to edit or delete Daniel's posts but why would she want that anyway with regard to managing content Nora has more rights than the four others in contrast to her travel buddies she can edit publish and delete posts of every author in other words she can take up the role of editor whenever she wants this role is included in a Roes admin an editor has all the rights to do things that are related to content management for example editors can also write Pages where authors can only write posts however editors can't activate plugins create users or install teams as admins can let's continue with the last two user rules WordPress offers contributors can write edit and delete their own posts but they can't publish them as authors can if many people write for one site you might want to have one central figure that decides whether the content is actually published the central figure should have the role of editor the rest of the team can deliver content in the role of contributor this limitation can also be useful when you work with guest riders or when someone other than the writer needs to add tags or images before the content goes live contributors can't accidentally hit publish it makes it easier for editors to keep keep things under control by the way it's important to note that contributors can't access the media library to upload files whereas authors can finally on the bottom of the WordPress user rule food chain we find a subscriber subscribers can reach your site post comments and create a profile but they can't write edit or delete posts so what's the use of this user role you might think well for people who add comments to post very often this makees things a lot easier because you don't have to enter your details over and over again but you could also give subscribers access to spe specific content that would be invisible to other people like a training okay so far we've discussed five predefined user roles in WordPress the administrator a super admin the editor the author the contributor and the subscriber in addition to these predefined rules developers can also create new rules we did that for Oso plugin for instance so don't panic when you find more user rules in your WordPress install than the ones we discussed in this video they've probably been added by other plugins now let's get practical where can you find these user rules in the WordPress back end and how can you change them keep in mind that only admin users can add new users and assign user rules this is the back end of everyday I'm traveling you can see that Norah Smith is currently logged in as administrator now click the menu item users in the admin menu click add new user if that is what you want fill in the fields and select the user Ro down here you can also change the user Ro directly in the user overview or edit the user profile by clicking the name and then changing the user role over here don't forget to change the nickname too because it's set to the username by default if you don't change it people will see your username under the title of your poster in the sidebar and this makes it easier to hack your account finally don't forget to click update user that's it thank you for watching and good luck assigning rules to your users updates every everyone knows them and most of us find them annoying we love to ignore updates for as long as we can the same goes for making backups it's a hassle and often an afterthought but how sensible is that really in this video we'll explore three reasons why updates are essential security bug fixes and new features we'll also tell you why and how to make backups of your WordPress site but first let's explore the importance of updates when you click that update button you are adding the latest code from the developer of the Plug-In or theme that you are updating they usually update this code because of a couple of different reasons the first one is security as WordPress Powers more than onethird of the web it also becomes interesting for hackers to look for the security holes in WordPress because if they find weak spots in the system it gives them the opportunity to attack tens of millions of websites hacks can help spread spam or or inject viruses this can obviously hurt you in several ways therefore improving security is by far the most important reason to update your WordPress website by installing updates of Wordpress core files plugins and themes the security of your website is often considerably improved developers constantly try to adjust the vulnerable parts of the code to make them more secure against external attacks so if you want to reduce the risk of your website being hacked don't hesitate just update the second reason to update often has to do with socalled bug fixes When developing software it's almost impossible to avoid errors creeping in luckily the WordPress Community is very active and alert if the community members spot errors in the code which are called Bugs they report them to the developers the developers then try to fix these bugs which will lead to another update bug fix is simply make sure your product works better and lastly updates unlock new features for you many developers are constantly working on their products to improve them for example the new block editor in the latest versions of Wordpress it's become a lot better and easier to use with recent updates these new features are only available to those who hit that update button though you don't want to miss the boat on cool stuff that benefits your site unfortunately updating WordPress themes and plugins is not not always as simple as just one click most updates are fairly quick and successful but something does go wrong now and then parts of the website May no longer work optimally content may look strange or even vanish and worst case scenario entire websites may go completely blank you can minimize your risks by only using high quality plugins and themes but it is never entirely predictable how a plugin interacts with a theme or with another plugin and it can also be risky to update upate old software for which you've missed a couple of updates which is actually a reason to update regularly and frequently therefore before you update it's always wise to take a look at what exactly is updated so you can test and take this into account you can view this before installing an update by clicking details now another thing that's important to do regularly is making a backup of your website before updating if updates cause issues you can always revert to an earlier version of your website updates aren't the only reason for backups you may also have problems with your hosting provider or get hacked when you do it's useful to say the least to have an upto-date backup of your web WordPress site you should always save this backup in different places for extra security for example you could save a copy on the hard drive of your laptop and save a copy on your external hard drive as well making a WordPress backup is not complicated however keep in mind that the process consists of two separate parts a backup of the WordPress files must be made as well as a backup of your WordPress database you can create backups either manually through your host or and this is by far the easiest and most convenient way by using a WordPress plugin we won't go into how to create backups manually since it's a little Advanced and the results will be the same as backing up through your host or via a plugin let's first take a look look at how to backup your site through your host a good web host will allow you to set automated backups from within their control panel this is usually limited to a backup once a day for the low to medium tier hosting packages there is also a wide range of Wordpress backup plugins for example you have WordPress database backup plugins plugins that just backup your files but also plugins that do both these backup plugins help you to make a backup quick and easy due to the wide range of possibilities in the WordPress directory it is sometimes difficult to make a choice here are three of the most well-known backup plugins the vaultpress service was set up by automatic the company behind wordpress.com with vaultpress you can arrange automatic backups vaultpress is now part of the jetpack plug-in in addition to backups vaultpress also monitors the security of your website From the Vault press control panel you can download backups or restore them IM immediately the blog fold surface is one of the best solutions for creating and managing backups in WordPress blog fold also gives users the option to choose real-time backups this is not necessary for most websites but if you have an online shop with many orders you want to be sure that you will not lose any orders if you restore a backup blog fault takes care of this updraft plus is one of the most popular backup plugins for WordPress in addition to the free version updraft plus also offers two paid versions updraft Plus premium and updraft plus gold with those paid versions you can do more than just backups for example you can also use the premium versions to migrate your websites and these versions of the plug-in will automatically make a backup before you install an update in addition updraft plus gives you storage space for the paid versions in the updraft fold so that's it for the theory in the upcoming screencast we'll guide you through the Practical process of making backups and doing updates in other words we'll teach you what you have to do for your own site in the previous video you learned about the importance of updating and backing up your site regularly in this video we will explore some of the ways you can back up your data and perform updates in WordPress more precisely we will show you how to back up your site using plugins and how to update your WordPress vers version your themes and your plugins note that we will not go over how to back up your site through your host this is because backing up differs per host so it is likely that the way we can back up with our host will not be the same as you can do it with yours another note before we go on so far we have been using a local test site which was not live or it wasn't visible to the public however to most effectively show you how to do backups we will now be using another site which is a test site but it is live and it is functioning since it is a test site you may notice some clutter here and there but please pay no mind to that okay now that we have everything out of the way let's start we start with backups because before doing any updates especially major ones like updating to a new version of Wordpress it is highly recommended to do a backup first for the sake of time and convenience we will show you how to do backups with two different plugins updraft plus and blog volt but be aware that these are not the only plugins you can use to back up your site we have chosen these particular two based on their popularity and our own positive experience however if you know of other plugins do feel free to use them first we will see how to back up a site with the updraft Plus plugin we'll already showed you how to find and install plugins so we will go through this quickly to save time I already installed and activated the plugin once activated this particular plug-in creates a tab in the settings menu item so let's go there you see the tab is created here and I will click on it again for the sake of time I already performed the backup but we can still check out the options here in this screen you can choose to backup straight away by clicking the backup Now button but let's first see what else is there in the first step there is an overview of the scheduled backups as well as a list of existing backups to schedule a backup and adjust the settings we need to go to the settings tab I click on the tab and we see that we can schedule backups for files and database separately what's the difference between these two well files form the core of your site and make sure everything works for example files govern what happens with the different WordPress features in your backand and with the plugins you have installed a database on the other hand stores files Associated to your site in a structured manner the files stored in the database are for example a comment someone left on your site the time and date that comment was published and the IP address of the commenter the information on your posts Pages categories and tags and how everything relates to each other is also stored in the database to to be safe and secure it is best to backup both the files and the database the frequency of your backups that you can set here will depend on the type of site you have if you post regularly or if you have an e-commerce site for example it may be advisable to back up very regularly very regularly as you can see if you click the options here can mean as often as every 2 hours if on the other hand you write posts once a week or even less frequently you may choose to do backups weekly or bi-weekly here you also choose how many backups you want to save the number of backups you save will depend on your needs and how active your site is now where do these backups go in the case with this plugin the setting below let you choose where to store the backups out of all these many options I chose Google drive again out of convenience since I already had a readily available account below this option there is a list of things you can choose from and I will choose all of them and then click save now if you also choose to store your files in Google Drive you will first need to go through an authentication process and the plug-in will guide you every step of the way so that will be easy Once you are done with that you can go back to the first step and just click backup now once the backup is done you will get a message that it was successful and you will be able to find your files here in this screen since I chose Google Drive if I go to my Google Drive I will see the backup files are also available there back to the back end the options now is to click on each of these buttons and download the files to the computer this is recommended since in that way you will have the files stored in multiple locations the reason to save files in multiple locations for example your computer a hard drive the cloud is to make sure that your back backups will remain accessible if one of the locations becomes corrupt or inaccessible there are some remaining options in the plugin that allow you to choose to restore this version delete it and view a log so that was the basis of what you can do with this particular plug-in I will stop here because as I mentioned this is not an advertisement but an illustration of how one particular plugin can help you back up your site easily another widely used plugin that provides backups is the blog vault as with the previous plugin I have also already installed and activated this one I can find this plugin in the admin menu and I will click on it now you see here I already provided an account and linked it with the site when you provide the account you will see a drop- down menu where you will be able to choose to backup your site it is all very simple and you will just need to give an email address and go through a few easy steps since we already connected the account we can go straight to the blog volt dashboard we have mentioned this before a lot of times how things appear differ per plugin and here you see a living proof while with the first plugin we did the backup with the back end in the settings menu with this one we need to go to an external site to access the plug-in dashboard and what we see here is in fact the blog wall dashboard where we see an overview of the website the first box here shows the backups which is what we will focus on I will click on the backups number a new screen opens with details about the backup and here we see that actually there is a backup currently in progress and the option in the right corner here allows you to migrate the files upload them to Dropbox download them and test the backup finally you can choose when the next backup should be performed with the sync options so that's it for the backups it's pretty simple really if you use a plugin now that we saw how we can back up a site with some plugins let's check out the updates WordPress does quite a good job at making sure to remind you of any available updates if a new version of Wordpress is available you will usually be notified right here in the dashboard when you have the dashboard open you can also see the notifications in the updates tab right here in the admin menu let's click on that and see what's there first you see the most critical issues WordPress want to draw your attention to there is also a reminder by WordPress that it is best to do backups before moving on to updating we already did that so we should be fine you see here there is also a button to check for available updates WordPress does it automatically but if you want you can do it manually by clicking this button now the available updates are listed under different headings you can update WordPress as well as plugins and themes we see here that actually all our plugins are up to date so we will update only the themes but it actually works the same so there's no problem there I will click select all and click update themes I will be taken to a new screen where I will be able to see the progress of my updates and once the update is done I will go back to the update screen okay we have the plugins and themes updated let's just update WordPress now and we are done all we have to do is click the update now button and we will be informed that the update is done and in this case we also see that a database update is also required so let's just click that as well and that is done and now we can go back and that is it actually now it may happen that you will run into errors or issues when doing backups and updates one way to control what is happening on your site is to go to the tools menu item in the admin menu then click on site held tab you can see any issues that have been detected and if you need to do something about it we will go into more detail about this in the reading materials in addition to the site held you can also install a plugin called health check and troubleshooting we will also see a bit more about this in the reading materials finally yet another way to make sure things will not go sou is to First deactivate your plugins before updating WordPress of course all of these things are optional and it is your responsibility to decide what you will do with your site so that is it in this screencast we saw how to back up your site with two different plugins and how to update WordPress plugins and themes hopefully you notice that it was not very hard so we do encourage you to regularly update and backup your site and keep it safe in this video I will take you through some common mistakes so you've got your site up and running you know how to create content and keep your site up to date you've got backups sorted and that's great because that's one of the most commonly made mistakes here are a couple of more common mistakes you should avoid as we've learned in a previous lesson it's good to think about your permal links before you actually start using Wordpress permal links the name kind of says it are meant to be permanent so once you've set them you really shouldn't change them again if you do decide to change them the URL of your post will change this means search engines can no longer find your post as they have indexed the old permal link visitors coming to your site via search engines will end up on your site with an error message saying the post could not be found the infamous 404 message between WordPress all the plugins and themes it can be hard to keep track of all the updates the site needs especially if everything is working smoothly it can be even harder to see the immediate value and taking the time to process those updates but keeping plugins and themes and wordpess itself updated is one of the most important tasks you have as a site owner updates not only bring new features but often times fix bugs and security issues last thing you want to see happen is end up with a hacked site right we've talked about what plugins are and what they can do and with more than 50,000 plugins available in the WordPress repository you have a lot of options to choose from which makes it very tempting to install an plugin for every little thing you can think of but that doesn't come without a cost not only will you have to keep all these plugins up to date Whenever there are updates but there are other risks as well you may end up with a slow s side too many pluging doing fancy stuff can possibly slow your site down so evaluate carefully before you install a new plug-in we've talked about where to get a theme for your site chances are you found one that fits your needs you've installed it but after a little while you realize you want to change a few things and you can but before you dive into how to change your theme you should create a child theme and make your changes in the child Theme by doing this you'll be sure that when your initial theme sees some updates you won't lose all your modifications by the way there's a big chance you only want to do some CSS changes and the customizer should suffice for this CSS is a markup language that's used to design what a website looks like that's also a futureproof way to change things about your theme one of the most common mistakes we see is once you have your site up and running you may want to delete posts or p PES they may no longer serve the purpose they used to serve and it makes good sense to remove those however since the search engines have indexed your site deleted content on your site will render the infamous four or4 pages page not found our Yos SEO premium plugin solves this for you when you first install WordPress WordPress will create a sample page and a hello world post for you make sure you delete the default sample page via the pages menu and the hello world post via the post menu okay that's it for this lesson in the next lesson we'll dive a little deeper into the world of security we've arrived at the last lesson of this module in this lesson we're going to talk about WordPress security as is stated on the WordPress website Security in WordPress is taken very seriously but as with any other system there are potential security issues that may arise if some basic security precautions aren't taken what does this mean well basically if you don't want your site to get hacked you should improve the security of your WordPress site if your security isn't up to par it's easier for hackers to steal your user information passwords install malicious software and even distribute malware to your users we're assuming this isn't something you'd want that's why in this lesson we'll enumerate some suggestions on how to improve Security on your WordPress sit please make sure to back up your site before trying any of the methods we'll discuss in this lesson since we don't know how your site is built we're not sure how it will respond to these tips the most important thing for WordPress Security is to make sure everything on your site is updated to the latest version your WordPress core installation your themes your plugins if you make sure they're all up toate on a daily basis you'll reduce security risks tremendously a recent study shows that a very large percentage of all website hacks came from out-of-date vulnerable versions of plugins so it's crucial to update all of your themes plugins and your WordPress core installation when there are new and improved versions available make sure you always keep your plugins your themes and WordPress itself up to date always what's also very important your password make sure your password is hard to guess 1 2 3 4 5 6 isn't a password and even Star Wars made the list of most used passwords remember you're not as unique as you think you are an easy thing to remember is make sure your password is clu complex long and unique but even then coming up with a difficult password usually just isn't enough computers are trained to guess passwords and passwords that are hard for humans to remember are usually easy for computers to guess most strong passwords that humans come up with have the same structure they start with a capital some letters are substituted for numbers a four instead of an a anyone and they usually end with a punctuation mark and or a number therefore we strongly recommend using a password management tool password managers basically do two important things one they generate super strong unique long and random passwords for you so you don't have to come up with them yourself two they store and manage these passwords for all your online accounts in an encrypted format it's much safer to use a randomly generated password instead of a human generated one and with a password manager you don't have to worry about remembering them password managers we recommend are one password and lost BS another way to reduce the risk of hackers getting into your site is by using two Factor authentication also abbreviated with 2fa the essence of two Factor authentication is exactly as implied in the name two forms of authentication it's not enough to just enter your username and password you'll also have to enter a code usually generated by an app on your phone Google Authenticator and AI are the most used apps for this but this is also included in one password one of the password managers we mentioned there are other forms of authentication factors as well like fingerprints your eyes Iris voice Etc what also makes your WordPress site more secure is using a secure connection how well you should make sure your site uses https instead of HTTP when you type in a URL in the search bar your browser tries to connect with it with an HTTP connection this is all done in plain site and there's no encryption to be seen so every time you log into a site that you connect to Via an HTTP connection the data you enter your username your password is sent in plain text trust me that's really bad https secures this process it encrypts the connection between the browser and the site therefore making sure that no one can intercept data sent between those two so if your site is still on HTTP you should make sure you switch to https we've explained more on how to go by this in the reading materials moreover make sure your site is hosted by a hosting company that cares about your site Security check if they have support to help you out with the Hacked site check if they offer backups redundant firewalls malware scanning and DDOS attack protection a DDOS attack is an attempt to make a website unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources our list of Wordpress hosts on y.com WordPress hosting should be your go-to list all the hosts listed on this page P get our seal of approval when it comes to security also it's really important to create regular backups off your site then in the unfortunate event that your site gets hacked you will at least have the data so you can quickly restore your site and again we really can't stress this enough make sure you keep everything on your site up to date okay time to wrap things up in this lesson we've listed the most important and basic tips for improving Security on your WordPress site Please be aware that this is not a complete list there are a lot more things you could do to improve your site security we've listed more tips in the reading materials as well as links to useful sites and articles about WordPress Security in the previous modules we showed you how to create a great site with WordPress but creating a great site isn't enough you want people to actually visit it as well unfortunately just having a good site isn't enough to make that happen and that's where the real challenge begins of course our travel bloggers can ask their friends and family to check out their site they'll say it's very cool and that's awesome but this is an international travel blog we're talking about our bloggers and we assume the same applies to you are going to want to make sure that they have some traffic coming in from other sources as well but how creating a WordPress site is only the first step on your way to startom for the other steps you need to work on your SEO before we start giving you tips let's first take a look at what SEO actually is and why you should work on it SEO stands for search engine optimization it is the process of improving websites and content to get more traffic from search engines SEO has an onpage part and an off-page part onpage SEO is everything you do on your site itself to make it better it consists of a technical part as well as a Content part both have to be awesome for you to have a chance of doing well in the search results off-page SEO encompasses everything you do outside of your site to get people to visit it like social media or organizing events working on your SEO means improving the chance your site will be the one people will actually visit when you visit the WordPress homepage you'll notice it has an illustration saying the CMS is SEO friendly that's true by by installing WordPress you get a pretty good experience out of the box a lot of Basics are handled well by WordPress but it would be a mistake to think that you're ready to rank after installing WordPress in this module we'll show you how to avoid this trap we'll first tell you what WordPress does for you we'll also explore how y SEO can help and what you have to do yourself so what does WordPress do out of the box WordPress helps you get going quickly and it's a pretty solid platform to work on among other things it supports so-called pretty Prett peral links so you can use SEO friendly URLs like this one rather than this one we've shown you how to do this earlier in the course WordPress also supports the title tag this makes sure that the title you entered is also rendered in the code so the search engines know exactly where to find the all important title of your post also WordPress automatically deals with duplicate content on some pages by that we mean that you sometimes show the same content on different URLs let's consider an example say you sell products in different colors and sizes you have a different URL for each product variation but the description of the product stays the same this may seem harmless but as a matter of fact it can really hurt your rankings because duplicate content confuses Google WordPress solves this for some pages by adding a so-called canonical link showing that one version of the page is the one you want to show in the search engines it doesn't do this for all pages however but we'll get back to that in the next video out of the box WordPress also redirects posts whenever you change their titles which is very convenient imagine if you decide you don't like the way you framed your post you rewrite it and then you still have the old URL which doesn't fit the contents of your post anymore it would be very confusing for visitors and search engines alike and lastly a recent addition is the health check dashboard Bo that shows you how your site is doing in a technical sense but even with the things WordPress does automatically when it comes to SEO WordPress still needs help now it is possible to optimize your site all by yourself but we wouldn't recommend that it would take ages and you'd really have to know your stuff there are tons of Wordpress SEO plugins out there that can help you take care of the most important improvements like y's SEO and of course you need to do some things yourself in the next two videos we'll explore exactly that in the previous video we showed you some things that WordPress does for your SEO out of the box but WordPress still leaves a lot of things to be done if you want your site to rank high in the search engines some of these things you'll have to do yourself other things yosio can do for you or help you with in this video we'll explore exp how you can use y SEO to improve your SEO let's start with what we are most well known for are green orange and red bullets feedback the feedback helps you optimize your post for all kinds of SEO and writing best practices if you're writing a post for example it's smart to think about the search term or Search terms you want that post to be found for that's called your key phrase we help you check whether your text is well optimized for your keyphrase let's see how this works if you use our plug-in you will find youro here after you enter your keyphrase we're run to check on your content we check for example how often you've used your key phrase and whether you've used them in the right spots the feedback that comes with the bullets tells you exactly how you can improve your post in the free plug-in you can optimize for one focus keyphrase in yosio premium you can optimize for synonyms and related key phrases as well another cool feature of yosio Premium is that it recognizes different word forms if you optimize for the key phrase by ballet shoes boy for example it will also recognize bying ballet shoes boys this includes singulars plurals possessives comparatives and different tenses this means you can use different forms of your focus keyphrase and the analysis will still be able to recognize them we also check your text for readability readability is very important for SEO and for a successful website in general online writing has to grab the attention of the reader and keep it our readability analysis gives you feedback on how to make your copy is clear and easy to read as possible let's move on to another very convenient tool the yast SEO snippet editor thanks to this tool you can see your content Through The Eyes of the Searcher what should your post or page look like in the search results here you can present Google with a suggestion of what your search result should look like mind you Google doesn't always copy your suggestions but you can optimize your chances right here finally I want to mention three more features of yoso that take away the stress of technical optimization from you we've already mentioned that WordPress takes care of canonical links on some of your pages Yos SEO takes it a step further and solves canonical for all your pages moreover it allows you to indicate whether you want to canonicalize very similar posts or pages so the search engines will never be confused in case of duplicate or similar content in that way Yos makes sure that your content is always found under the URL you want it to be found under we also add structured data through your pages this code contains all kinds of information about your page and makes it easy easier for Google to understand who you are and what your website and indiv individual pages are about this allows Google to make sense of your page and maybe even show Rich results for your pages which really stand out from other results last but not least Yost SEO rolls out the red carpet for the search Bots making it super easy to crawl your site and find everything and equally important making sure the pages you don't want to show up in the search results are kept away from Google in the paid version of a plugin there are even more features they're mainly Time Savers and things that make your life easier which starts with 24/7 support but includes convenient stuff like internal linking suggestions which really help you organize your site quickly and intuitively then there's social previews which help you manage what your post will look like on social media like Twitter and Facebook and our redirect functionality helps you Shore up your site if you want to delete or redirect Pages now there's lots more to tell about our premium plug-in but that's not what you got this course for the main thing to take away here is that there are lots of SEO things you don't want or need to think about then again there are some things that only you can do and that you absolutely need to think about when trying to create a successful website we're going to explore those in the next video in the previous videos we showed you how WordPress and Y SEO can Kickstart your SEO our plug-in takes care of a lot of things and it will make your life easier but our plugin can do your SEO for you completely creating content obviously is something that you will have to do for yourself of course you can Outsource it but it remains a task that requires human effort so in this video I'm going to tell you what you need to do for yourself to make your SEO strategy successful so let's start with a little loow hanging fruit what are the simple things you can do to get quick results well first of all if you decide to install Yost SEO you need to configure the plug-in in the right way our configuration wizard helps you to easily configure your site to have the optimal SEO settings just answer the questions in the Wizard and we'll implement the right settings for your website this is really important because optimal plug-in results require an optimal configurations that makes sense right but let's go beyond the plug-in even if you decide not to use it there are lots of things you can work on yourself for instance you can start by choosing a good lightweight responsive theme that works well on all devices and doesn't come with a million features you won't use to make your site faster you can install a caching plugin And maybe invest in a good content delivery Network a CDN these tools help you get your content to your readers faster and you have to think carefully about what kinds of content you add as well adding images to your posts and Pages for example makes your content come alive but more often than not these images turn out to be way too big you need to optimize them you can do this by hand but that's a lot of work if you have a site full of them it's better to install an image optimization plugin that helps you to do this automatically every time you upload a picture remember and we have said this before be careful not to add too much sometimes site owners install dozens of plugins for everything under the sun this can really slow down your sides and maybe even pose a security risk when one of these plugins gets hacked only install plugins that you actually use and in addition please make sure to always back up your site we can stress this enough now let's get to the bigger stuff some of the things you do to optimize your website simply require a lot of work and thinking one of the most important examples is keyword research it's a vital element of your SEO strategy keyword research is a process where you try to determine the Search terms you want to be found for you need to ask yourself several questions what audience am I trying to reach what Search terms do these people use after all what's the use of optimizing your page for a term nobody uses in other words what's the use of ranking number one for pesarin when your target audience mainly searches for Songbird and there's another Factor you should take into account as well your competition Google the key phr