WordPress Tutorial For Beginners - Step by Step

hi my name is Daragh and in this wordpress tutorial you're gonna learn how to set up this website that looks great on all devices in under one hour and you don't need any technical skills to do this I'll walk you through every single step including how to get your own domain name and how to secure your site against hackers so that's what's coming up let's get straight into it to actually build our website we are going to be using a website builder called WordPress and in this video I want to explain briefly why we're going to be using WordPress Before we jump in to the actual steps and I also want to explain why we're going to be using WordPress over other options out there like Wix Weebly Squarespace etc you might have seen some of these other website builders out there well I think the most important reason to use WordPress it is because it is the most popular website builder or content management system as it's also known so 29% of the web uses WordPress like this is insane from hobby blogs to biggest sites to the biggest new sites online so you can see some of them here Vogue magazine Bloomberg and Beyonce jay-z like a lot of people use WordPress so it is by far and away the most popular option now Wix Weebly Squarespace even combined all of them are less than 1% of the websites out there so if you're picking a platform to learn and to understand I think it's much more valuable to learn WordPress because there's much more demand in terms of businesses and clients for people with WordPress skills and personally I think that's a great reason to learn how to use WordPress now another great thing about WordPress is that it's open source software so nobody actually owns WordPress it's actually free software and now in order to get our site up with a with our own domain we do have to pay for hosting so it's not like it's free to have a branded WordPress site but what is interesting and what I like about this open source software asked is that you could never just be they can never just raise the prices on you on wigs for example you're kind of bought into their whole platform if they raise the prices well then you can't really just easily move your site somewhere else on WordPress if your hosting company which is who you pay to keep the site up if they actually increase the prices well then you can just move to another hosting companies so I really like that aspect that it's open source and it gives me a sense of security if I'm investing time building a site that I know that for the long term it's always going to be there and I'm they're never gonna increase the prices without me having an option to switch so I really like that about WordPress as well now the final thing about WordPress which I think is a great reason to use it is that they have a massive team and plug-in ecosystem so teams are essentially skins that you put on top of WordPress and it can completely change the look and feel of your site and there are roughly 10,000 WordPress themes out there and that means that you've 10,000 options to change your site for some companies like Wix they maybe have a couple of hundred so there's just much more options for WordPress similarly they have what's called a plug-in ecosystem and this allows you to add additional functionality to your site there's over 50,000 plugins and these are just little pieces of functionality that you can add to your site very very easily you just install them and essentially you can automatically add that functionality in and so it's great to have so many options to add this all in which you wouldn't have with another website builder like Wix or Weebly except etc they just don't they're just not capable of creating all of this extra software because all of this extra software is created by independent companies and that's the beauty of reading that open source aspects of WordPress so to sum up then why use WordPress over some other website builders well number one 20 9% of the internet uses it so you create your building skills that are much more valuable in the marketplace - its open source which means you're always protected in terms of a company shutting down or price changes a number 3 then there is a huge theme and plug-in ecosystem which really allows you to change the look and functionality recite very very easily now the first two steps to setup your very own website is firstly to get web hosting and then to register your domain name now web hosting would really allow you to store your website online so that people can access it all over the world and your domain name will be for example your company names com and that's your web address so people really know where to access your site so there are plenty of places where you can complete these two steps but I would recommend Bluehost com they are the company that I use personally they've never let me down and also I've organized a pretty cool discount for you guys if you want to check it out the link is in the description you get a free domain which will save you about $15 and then you can also get a 60 percent discount on your web hosting so in the first year you'll probably have saved $75 if you click the link in the description but your can feel free to use any web host you want and the steps that I'm gonna walk through in this video are pretty much gonna be exactly the same so either click on the link and you're gonna come to a page like this and then you can click get started now and then we need to select our web hosting plan and there are a couple of options here but I think for most people you're just gonna gonna select the basic plan that's to 95 per month with the discount and that means you can host one website online now the only other option you might be considering is the Plus plan so for a little bit more you can have unlimited websites and host them and why would you want to do that well maybe if you're thinking of setting up a couple of websites or maybe even you're creating websites and managing them for people then this is a very affordable plan to select but I think for most people you're just gonna want to be selecting the basic plan and I do want to explain a little bit further now why do you even need web hosting in the first place if you've never set up a website it's a bit of a alien concept because we just post stuff to Facebook YouTube for free and actually those companies absorb that hosting costs themselves they have to pay for data centers with servers on them and so unfortunately they won't pay for it when it's our own site and that's why we've to pay for it essentially we're buying here a little bit of space on a server in a database somewhere and that's why we pay when we set up our own website and we never pay when we upload to YouTube etc because they really cover the cost so I think I've people find that explanation helpful and so now that you understand why you need hosting I think and you know the plan to select let's go ahead and select this basic plan here now here comes the exciting part we need to get our free domain and so what you really want to do is think about your business name and type it in here so in terms of picking a domain name I would try and keep it as short as possible less than 20 characters you want it to be something that rolls off the tongue easily so if you said it in conversation they would remember that that was your what web address and it's more important to have a domain name that is brandable and memorable rather than a domain name that has loads of your keywords in them because actually having keywords in your domain name is not going to really help you rank in the search engines it might give a clue about what your business is about so try and include them if you can but don't have like 10 keywords stuck together and people are never going to remember that they're never going to type that in so you want to keep it as short as possible so if you're creating a new domain you can type it in here or you also have this option if you've bought a domain previously to go ahead and sign up so I'm going to just put in WP so WordPress set up demo and then we get to select our the main ending you can see now it's on Dakota UK and I would try and get the dot-com if you can if it's available that's what people remember the most it seems like the most trustworthy they don't have to think about what's the domain ending but there are other options out there you can see them here and dot org is very popular for charities dokko is becoming more popular as well for startups and new companies and but for now I'm just gonna buy the dot-com and then click Next so now we need to go and fill out our account information so I'm just going to take a couple of moments to fill this all out so once you've filled out your account information then you just want to review your package information and you can see by default here there will probably be a couple of options selected by default so I'll just explain what each of these options are and then you can decide whether you want to leave them enabled or not so the first one is domain privacy protection so what is this about well the reason you might want to keep this is because there is a site called who is calm and I'll just put in an example site here crowd starts calm and on this site people can find out the phone number and the email that you would have put in when you registered your domain name now a lot of people don't want that information public you might get a couple of random emails or maybe even a phone call so some people select this domain privacy protection options so they don't get that now personally I don't mind if I get a random email so I can save myself really a dollar just by doing that now site backer Pro this is an option maybe you should leave enabled essentially what this will do will backup your site especially if you have a big site with a lot of content on it and you may be changing content you may be editing the code something like that something breaks and you need to get your backup version so that you can get your site back up and running for this demo site that I'm setting up I'm not going to select that but I think that is a good option for a lot of people now site security again there's more information there and I'm going to show you a couple things to do to secure your site so you don't need that option then once you're ready all you need to do is type in your payment information which I'm going to take a minute to do now okay I've typed in my payment information there and then you just want to select I've read the Terms and agreements and click Submit okay so great our purchase was successful and a confirmation has been sent to our email address before we can log in as it says here we need to create a password next up then is just to go ahead and insert a secure password and it'll give you an indication of how strong that is so I would recommend you try and make that strong so your site stays secure and then you can just say I've read the terms in agreements and click Next so they'll give us the option here to pick a theme what I will actually do is just skip this step okay we're all done now I'm getting a notification here that they will update my domain automatically as soon as it's ready so that's good to know you might see a similar notification and then we can just go ahead and click start building so here we are now in the backend of our brand new website and if you want to take a look at what it looks like just come up to welcome come up to visit site and we can see that this is what our site is really looking like now it's pretty basic so far not a lot of content on it but we're gonna be making this really look incredible and adding content to it but that really wraps up the first steps to setting up your site registering the main name getting hosting and installing WordPress now that you have set up your WordPress website and you were logged in to the backend I want to bring you on a tour of the WordPress dashboard so you can really understand how easy it is to change the look and feel of your site so the first thing that I want to explain to you is if you come down into appearance and then themes is really the most radical way that you can change the look and feel of your site and that is to change the theme so we can see right now that we have the 2017 2017 theme installed on our site it's active and this team comes free with all WordPress sites in 2017 and also you can see the previous versions here as well which you can activate if you want also you can add themes that you find online and I'm also going to show you how to install a premium corporate theme in a little bit as well but the key message that I want to say is that if this is not the type of site that you want do not worry about it at all you can install a team that transform this into a fully functioning ecommerce site you can change this to a corporate website or whatever WordPress is definitely not just for blogs and just by changing the team is really a radical way that you can change the look and feel of your site but before we get into that I just want to walk through some of the more basic steps that you can easily change right away and play around with so well let's come up to our posts and have a look at all of our posts here we can see that we have just one post or blog posts on our site called hello world and this will come the as defaults as well so we can see it here that's the title and this is the content of the post so if we want to change that we can come into edit and what we can do now is to edit the title of this post so let's just change this to first post and if you were typing a blog post this is where the title of your blog post would go and we can just say this is my first post this is my first post yay and what we can also do is change the URL of this post as well so what we can put in here is first - post so let's update this and see how it changes on our site so there we go we've changed the title and the post and even if we click into this we should be able to see the URL that has changed as well now what you might be seeing in this URL is the date and it is possible to remove that so it's just our website comm forward slash whatever we've put in there and so to do that I would I would highly recommend you do this just even further the search engines so come down into settings permalinks and then we can set the URL as the post name then we can go ahead and click Save Changes and now let us come back to our posts to make sure that it that has changed so if we edit it again just open that up we can see that that has been changed and if we go to reef we'll have to change the URL here and we can see that that's coming up and that that is showing much more cleaner and easier and that's actually much more search engine friendly so I would really recommend that you come in to your settings and change those permalink settings to the post name so there we've edited a post now what about if we wanted to add a post well again we just come to the sidebar click on add new and we can just type in second post we just wanted to see the content again and you can see that now because we've changed the permalink settings that it's just showing up as /our keyword or our title so I'm gonna go ahead and publish that and if we come into our site preview we can see that's showing up here now in the recent posts and even if we just come back to our home page we should be able to see the second posts and the first posts so there you go that is how you add a post to your site and already that's how we're starting to build up the content now you're gonna learn how to add pages to your WordPress website so come back into the dashboard once again you want to come to pages this time and then let's firstly have a look at all the pages on our site so right now we can see that we just have one sample page and again we can click into edit this and if we want to really preview the page we can just open it up as well so here we can see it's just a sample page it's the title of the page and it looks like kind of an about Us section so what we can do is change this page name again to about us we can also change some of the text here as well so I'll just delete some of that just to show you the difference or maybe let's just keep as this part here and we can write this text as well and what we can just make sure as well that this changes to about us now what we can go ahead and do is update the page and let us preview the changes as well so we can really see it there so it's changed to about us and we can see the text here that you are there inputted yourself or that I just just left in there so if we come back to our just normal page though we can't actually see this about Us page it's kind of hidden away somewhere so what we want to do is insert a menu appear at the top so we can really see the pages of our site across the top and before we do that we might end up adding one more page so let's just put in services our services and again what we can do is preview it just to see how it looks like there's nothing there now but essentially we've created another page and we can just go ahead and publish it now as we said we can't see those pages from our home page so how do we get those visible to our visitors well what we can do is come down to appearance and then menus and what we want to do is go ahead and create a menu then we can call this main menu and then create it now what we want to do is add our pages to our menu and then we can go ahead and click display locations menu and save the menu and then if we open up our site and refresh the page we can see these menu items appearing up here and if we click through we can come and see our about Us page or our services page now if you want to adjust how those appear if you want to put the about Us page first then you simply just rearrange the order click Save and click refresh just to see those changes now what we want to do actually is want to put in a menu item for our homepage or our blog as well so what we can do is come across to our menu click view all click home click Add to menu and then we can see that that's been added click Save and click refresh and now we can see the home page which we can get back to quickly from any page on the site so what about these links in the sidebar here how could we change the appearance of this or the order of these or what we want to do is come into our dashboard once again this time come down to widgets and in here we can see the blog sidebar and we can add widgets in just to drag and drop them in if we wanted to see a calendar we could add that in and we can just give it a title calendar click Save if we refresh our site we can see the calendar appears up here so you can add in different things like a list of categories for your blog posts custom HTML which you maybe might use to put in a signup form for an email you can put in images aunt recent comments different things like that videos etc now what if you want to change the order well you simply just rearrange them here so if we come back in we can didn't see the search bars at the top and if you want to delete any of these widgets you can just go ahead and delete it very easily and it'll oil instantly update now there's one more important thing that you might want to change and that is a here and you can see it says welcome just another WordPress site so we do want to change that and to do that we can come to appearance once again come to customize and in here you can come into side identity and so what I'll put in here is the name of the site WP setup demo comm and then I can say learn how to set up a wordpress site then I can just click Save and publish now if I come to my site once again refresh the page you can see this change now that we've made all those changes one things you might want to do and just make sure is that your site is live so if we come to blue house right at the top here you may see this here that you can launch your site your site is currently displaying coming soon page so I'm gonna go ahead and click launch the site and once again we can go and view these site here so already you've learned how to change the tagline on your site add menus and posts and pages change the widgets as you can see it's very simple to work with WordPress even if you're non-technical like me if you want to take the look and feel of your WordPress website to the next level then something you should seriously consider our premium themes now if we come down into our site we can see underneath our themes here the team that we're using right now which is the 2017 theme it is the free theme that comes when you download WordPress and I think it looks pretty good and it's definitely all you need to have a fully functioning website but if you do want to take it to the next level then definitely consider getting a premium theme now there are lots of places where you can get premium WordPress themes but really the shop that I would recommend is my team shop calm and you can see they've over almost 400,000 happy customers I use them exclusively and because they have great themes but particularly because their support is incredible and that's really important for non-technical people you can see some of the questions that I've asked here just things I didn't really know how to do or couldn't figure age and they've really helped me and they always go back within 24 hours and that is really necessary if you're not that technical it's really really helpful and it's definitely not something that every team shop offers so that's why I would recommend these guys now in terms of the themes there are loads of options and they have over a hundred different themes here and they're all broken down by categories so you can come in and have a look at these if you want for example they have really good ecommerce themes as well so you can see this one you can essentially get this site by just getting downloading this team and you can see that something like this looks extremely professional it's a lot different to this and instead of you coding it or hiring a developer you can just buy this team and have all of that functionality look and feel built in so instead of spending hundreds or thousands on a developer to get the site you want you can just buy one of these themes for less than $50 now I do know there is a price tag on these and you might be thinking is it worth it but I can guarantee you this is a tiny investment that you could make to really make your site look professional and I think you would earn the money back pretty much straightaway so a couple of things that I like I'd recommend that one for e-commerce if you're just looking for an upgrade on the blog one theme that I've used in the past is the schema theme it looks great and when you click into all of these themes as well you can get a full demo of them to really get a sense of you know what they look like before you go ahead and purchase these if we click in here and all these come with a 30 day money back guarantee as well so you can always just try them out if you're not happy return them so schema theme really fast really SEO friendly as well that's why I've used to in the past and another one that I would recommend and that I'm actually going to use for this example is the corporate team here we go and I think this is a perfect theme if you have are setting up a company website you can see it looks great meet our team services our core portfolio different experience that we have plans and pricing etc so it looks extremely professional and it also has a blog and everything so you can do your content marketing so even if you're building websites for people I recommend you know by the team then you can deliver a very professional-looking website in a very quick time frame so I'm gonna go ahead and get this team and even if you want to get a different team the process is gonna be the same for installing it so I should go ahead to the checkout and get this one so I'm going to proceed to payments I'm gonna pay with debit card I'm gonna pop in my details here and then click I'm ready download so now what we need to do is just go ahead and check our email to get the download instructions so log in to your email and come to your folder and get your download link so just click on the link and then click on download instructions we want to click on download theme files and then we're gonna follow these steps here so we'll just download this zip file then what we want to do is go to appearance themes uploads so if we come back in to our dashboard and we come to appearance themes and then add the new theme and then we can come to upload theme choose the file choose theme then we can just click install now and then what we can do is activate the theme now once you can see the theme is active what you might want to do is just come up and visit the site to see any of the changes and what we can see here is that not a lot is happening this is not really what we wanted to get but don't worry all you need to do is just one further step come down into theme options and then down the end you're gonna see the import/export option and this will be the same steps no matter what my team SHOP theme that you buy and you can see here that you've three options import the theme options import op theme options and widgets import theme options widget and content so you want to select this option here if you want your site to appear exactly like it appears in the demo and if you want a reminder what that looks like just click that open and you can see that if you want your site to look exactly like this with all this demo content and all the pages and menus laid out exactly the same then you can just go ahead and select that option which I'm going to do to import the theme options widget and content and just click OK could take a couple of minutes for all of this to load up and once that done we can just click OK and then we can come again now and visit our site to see the changes so now that we can see that the theme and all of the sample content has been loaded up on our domain and I think it really looks fantastic now obviously this is only going to be sample content in here so we're going to want to customize this and update it for ourselves but it's very simple it's just drag-and-drop it's click it's just copy and paste but I think it looks really really good and also say if we come across to our blog we can change the post we can unpublish posts etc we can change the widgets we can change the pages so to do that we can come back in to our site and there is an additional tab here now under our appearance theme for our my team shop team called team options and this just makes it really easy again to change your theme that you've downloaded so if we come to general settings for example I'll come back to the home page we can change this logo and this favicon these small images here just by uploading them very simple to do and if we come then to our home page here we can see that we can change the home page layout so if we want to put teen above features on our home page we can just drag and drop that and move that around no coding required if we want to come to our intro and change the text an image on our home page and where that links to we can change all of this information here in this section and we can change the button we can change what it says we can change where it links to etc so very easy to send it to say your services page rather than your portfolio will keep on moving down just have a look at a couple of other things and meet our team so right now you can see that they have kind of sample text here and you obviously want to update that for your own team or your own team and you can just click in to change the photos change the links change the descriptions etc so very simple it's just drag a drop and we'll take a little bit of time to update the site with your own content but it's very simple to do and let us come and have a look at pages as well if you want to say remove some of those pages that come with the team and the sample contents you can do that easily you can just select the page you can edit it you can move it to trash you can do it in the same way if we come back guys we can actually select a bunch of pages at once select a bold action like and move it to trash or edit it and what is often a good idea is you don't maybe want to move it to trash so what you can always do is edit the page and our we can actually do a quick edge and we can unpublish the page move it to draft and so that will be there if we want to reinstate it later but it won't appear on our site so we can move any pages to that we don't want similarly if we look at pose week if we come across to our blog we can see that there quite a few posts here with a lot of sample content so what I would recommend you maybe do is just you can move those to draft you can update that and for example they will be removed from the blog but you can use those templates for later and you can do that for multiple ones as well now in the sidebar of our blog as well we can see you've got some widgets we might have sponsors we might have this image etc so once again very simple just come down into appearance widgets and we can just change these around now the cool thing about this theme is that it comes with different widgets as well so we can see that we have a link to all our social profiles now if we don't have all these social profiles what we can do is just remove the sample links here so I'll just for example take out Facebook and we can see Facebook here and what we can do if I say that take out the link you can see that's removed now you will want to put in the links to all of your own profiles here if you want to delete that completely you can just delete that that will disappear and if you want to reinstate it what you can do is come down here we should see social profile icons and we will just need to put in maybe a little hash or our own links in here so let's say I Pinterest Instagram LinkedIn Twitter that's probably all YouTube I'm gonna have click Save and they're all gonna come up there so you can see it's very easy to customize your team with your own content once you have downloaded it and one final thing you might want to do is change your team at some stage or upload a different theme or activate a different team so to do that come back to appearance themes and you can see if you did want to reinstate the team that you had previously you can firstly get a live preview of it I'm just to see what that looks like and really to see the difference now between this free theme and this paid theme that we have spent small amounts of money on I think this one looks way more professional hopefully this has opened your eyes to the value of premium themes and so if you want to go get one for yourself I would recommend my team shop the process is the same just download it and then upload that file into the theme and activate the theme now that your site is set up let's briefly talk about WordPress security and also how to install WordPress plugins which add additional functionality to your site so first in terms of keeping your site secure one of the best things that you can do is just come into updates here in the sidebar and just make sure that you have the latest version of WordPress WordPress are constantly updating the software just to prevent against any hackers or spam so the best way to stay protected is just to check that you have the latest version of WordPress you can just check that here or if you see a little notification to install it you can just click the button and go ahead and install it now there are the things that you can do to protect your site and one is to install some plugins with additional security feature so if we come down to the plugins sections here plugins really allow us to add additional functionality to our site and it's one of the key benefits of setting up a website with WordPress because you can really add so much extra functionality very easy in fact if we come to the wordpress.org site we can see under plugins here that there are about 50,000 extra plugins which we can easily just add into our site we can see how many people use them etc now I want to show you a plug-in that you can use to add a little bit of extra security to your site but before we do that we can actually go ahead and delete some of these plugins that are pre-installed on our WordPress site now plugins do take up a little bit of space on your side so if you're not using them it's probably recommended that you delete them so for example we can see that this jetpack and hello dolly are by default installed on our site and what we can do is actually firstly deactivate any plug-in that we don't want first and then what we can go ahead and do is select them and delete them so this is the process no matter what plug-in you are using you can install them delete them test them out and it's very easy to add them in now in order to find new plugins and you can just click on add new and then you can come up to the search bar here if you want you can also see some plugins are featured here and there's also some of the most popular ones here as well which you can come in and you can have a look at reading what they actually do and if you think that's applicable to you you can just go ahead and install them very very easily now I'm going to show you how to install a plug-in and this is one that will just help a little bit with securities it's called login lockdown and it should pop right up and what we can do is go ahead and just install this essentially what this will do is limit the number of login attempts from a given IP range within a certain period so say if somebody was trying to hack your site they're just putting a script on to try a load of different passwords well this little plugin will lock them out of the site for an hour so that they can't hack in so all you need to do is click install and then we can see it's been installed if we come to our list of installed plugins we can see that it is here we need to activate it and that's all we really need to do to add that extra security in now what you can do also is adjust those settings if you want so if you come to settings login lockdown we can see that the number of failed attempts before they retry we can change that if we want along they're locked out of you can adjust those settings easily for this plugin and for any plugin in the very same way once you download them I'm just going to leave it as it is it's a simple plugin and they no need to adjust the settings so that is how you add some additional security to your site remember just to make sure you're always updating to the latest version of WordPress you can add in a plugin like login like locked in and you can also add any other plug-in to your WordPress white website in the very same way congratulations on completing this WordPress tutorial if you found it helpful please share the link with your friends on social media or by email they'll thank you for it if you're ready to setup your website as a reminder the link to get your free domain at 60% off hosting is in the description and finally subscribe if you want to see more videos like this

Channel: Website So Simple

Views: 716,609

Rating: 4.8032966 out of 5

Keywords: wordpress tutorial for beginners 2020, wordpress tutorial, wordpress tutorial for beginners, wordpress tutorial for beginners step by step, how to use wordpress for beginners, wordpress website, create a wordpress website, wordpress, wordpress basics, wordpress for beginners, how to use wordpress, wordpress tutorial bluehost, wordpress 5.2.2., wordpress tips, wordpress tutorial full course, wordpress tutorial 2020, wordpress tutorial 2021

Id: EXKwAk0j3k8

Length: 40min 29sec (2429 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 29 2018