WordPress Tutorials for Beginners – 25 of the Web’s Best
WordPress makes the web easy for us all. Before, we would have to custom craft HTML to our whim to churn out something that was clunky and difficult on the eyes.
Today, WordPress makes that same process – and same amount of effort – create superior blogging products that make us look like the most experienced web development experts to the beginners who check out our blogs.
As WordPress enters a stage of maturity, so do the numerous great WordPress resources that help us do our jobs (blogging, design and development) better and easier than ever before. The below 25 articles are some of the web’s best – curated from some of the top websites for WordPress online.
These articles were found in multiple ways – through research, by looking at the top WordPress tutorial sites online, by asking friends – they’re by no means the only ones out there, but they’re definitely some of the best, and they’ve solved some of WordPress’ most difficult problems.
I’ve sorted them in three buckets, depending on your “beginners level” – if you’ve never touched a blog, if you have and want to get more advanced, and then the “I’m ready to be a WordPress developer” type jump that comes with being an advanced beginner.
Entry-Level WordPress
Have you never installed WordPress before? Have no idea where to find WordPress plugins in the dashboard? These are the tutorials for you.
Basic Tutorials for Beginners
If you’re with one of the old, old WordPress providers who don’t have easy-installs of WordPress, the WordPress.org hosted installation guide should help find you on your way to hitting “publish” in the CMS.
Getting Started with WordPress
This guide from instantShift allows the absolute-entry-level WordPress blogger know how to work their way around the installation, functionality and menus of the popular CMS. Easy to say if you’ve never used it, but for those who haven’t, it’s a very helpful guide.
Finding a Good WordPress Designer
At the beginning, you might want to find a good WordPress designer so you don’t start from a boring template. If you’re thinking that way, this guide is a good place to begin your search. In general, I suggest spending a lot of time finding designers so you make sure you choose one that can put out a premium product – cause you’ll basically end up stuck with it (and the bill).
You don’t want to find out – or have to worry – about WordPress hosting when it’s too late. It’s a common occurrence – someone writes up something that goes unexpectedly viral, their hosting can’t hold up, and they lose lots of the potential benefit from that viral growth. This post from WP Hub details the features of each of the most popular hosts such that you don’t make that same mistake yourself.
Something about holding a book in our hands can help learning – at least for some. WordPress.org has done us the favor of listing out the top books on WordPress, such that you can learn a lot whether on or off a computer.
ithemes created a pretty in depth video guide of many of WordPress’ different functionalities – a super useful resource for those starting out or in general, for those who prefer to learn by video rather than by text.
Importing From Other Blogging Systems
Before WordPress, there was other blogging systems. I think. Anyways, if you content was hosted on another blogging system, this guide will help you move things over efficiently and without many bumps and bruises.
Finding Your Way Around WordPress
Way Around WordPress – Source
If you’re blogging but don’t know much about how to modify your blog to take it to the next level, this next set of tutorials can set you in the right direction. In general, you’ll find stuff here you might not have even thought of, but is really valuable for your specific blogging needs. Get ready – it’s time to actually do some real work to learn this stuff, get better at WordPress and take our blogs to the next level.
Customizing WordPress Default Functionality
In general, one of the only faults with WordPress is the power of its default functions – many people get stuck in them and therefore do not find ways to add their own touch and flavor. This guide is a great way to get started with customizing your blog.
How to make a random post button
For those with giant websites with short posts, a random post button can be an effective way to drive continued user engagement and a sense of fun along with their site. This post shows us how installing that functionality isn’t nearly as hard as we might think.
Securing Your WordPress Website
WordPress has gotten better over time with the security updates, allowing for less hacks. However, it’s always a good idea to start first with security so someone can’t go in and immediately trash and wipe all the work you’ve done with your blog.
How to Install and Setup w3 Total Cache for Beginners
Total Cache allows you to store your website’s images for faster performance, creating a more streamlined experience for the visitors that come to your site – therefore improving conversion rate and lowering bounce rate (very highly correlated with site speed) – which is an overall win for your WordPress blog.
How to Setup an Email Newsletter on WordPress
In general, e-mail newsletters are something many bloggers wait to use until later in the process, but the earlier you start with one, the further along you’ll be with a pre built audience for your content. This tutorial from WPBeginner gives you the tools to unlock that traffic.
Speeding Up Your WordPress Website – An Ultimate Guide
As noted in the Total Cache tutorial, speeding up your website is something that’s super important to do. In this comprehensive post from Tutsplus, we learn various ways we can speed up our blogs from various other corners of our website. Turns out, speeding up our website is a smart thing to do.
Optimizing Your WordPress Site for Sharing on Facebook
In this post Sarah Gooding details every way we might use WordPress to create a more streamlined sharing process for Facebook. If your site is Facebook friendly, this is a smart path to set out on.
How to Style Your Author Comments in WordPress
In general, styled author comments creates increased usability as readers can scan and find your replies immediately – after all, you are the star of the show! Head of Google Webspam Matt Cutts shows us how in this blog post – you can also see how it can be extremely useful in his comments, as Cutts gets an extremely high volume of them, and rarely posts himself.
How to Backup WordPress Sites to Dropbox
In general, backup is a must for your blog. What if you got hit with some virus and lost all your content? All your hard work lost? That would be a worst case scenario, but it’s one worth preparing for. 1stwebdesigner helps get us prepped with this helpful guide.
Intermediate-Level Tutorials
WordPress Stickers Everywhere – Source
Thinking about doing WordPress for a career or in general, blogging for a career? You might want to go to WordPress college with this final set of tutorials – including advanced tutorials on designing your first plugin or theme. Once you go down this list, you’ll find yourself coding WordPress for days at a time.
Show Different Footers on WordPress Pages
Sometimes we want different footers for different parts of our site. For example, perhaps you don’t want to give your friends sitewide links (thought to be a negative SEO signal these days) but you do want to give them a strong homepage link. This post can help walk you through the process.
WordPress for SEO – Are You Setup For Success?
SEOmoz is the authority for all things SEO, so it’s no surprise that this helpful guide from Dan Shure helps explain some hiccups many of us might walk into when blogging over time. Topics include WordPress terminology, relationships in WordPress, and best practice configuration.
Definitive Guide to Semantic Mark-Up
You might not even know what this means – that’s a decent chance it’s an advanced tutorial. Semantic mark-up allows search engines to identify important pieces of your site. Popular WordPress Thesis designer Chris Pearson helps explain this topic so it’s not so confusing the second time.
Although not technically a “tutorial”, this cheat sheet will give you a nice baseline to work off of for all things WordPress. It’s basically a good set of training wheels as you go off to build your first website. Print it out, put it on your wall, and constantly refer to it as you tweak your WordPress install.
How to Manage Guest Posts in WordPress
In general, you’ll eventually want multiple authors such that you can create a bigger blog. WPbeginner’s guide also gives some general tips on how to attract guest bloggers.
How to Create a Premium Membership WordPress Blog
Generally, most of us want to make money. This three part tutorial helps get you going towards creating a premium membership subscription so you can make some dough on that audience you’ve worked so hard to create.
Creating a Responsive Mobile First WordPress Theme
Responsive web development is a growing trend, and until now, it was a difficult thing to implement with your WordPress design. This tutorial from Smashing Magazine gives you the steps to implement a responsive design so you may better delight your readers with all types of browser dimensions.
How to Write Your First WordPress Plugin
Writing a plugin is a big step for anybody to take, but if you a need and there’s nobody fulfilling the hole, writing one can be a great way to get your chops wet. The WordPress Codex (the first place to look for plugin info), has a great repository of information on coding up your first tool.
Developing Your First WordPress Theme
Tutsplus is a prominent resource for all things web, and this post proves why. If you’re ready to do a theme to continue build on the chops in earlier bullet points, this step 1 of 3 step guide sets you out on the proper path to do so.
BONUS: How to Become A Top WordPress Developer
So..you’ve made it this far. You’ve built the biggest, baddest WordPress site out there. Your code sparkles. You’ve made your own plugin, and a theme. Are you ready to stand out from the crowd as one of the best? Well, then – this tutorial is for you. Smashing Magazine details how to take your intermediate level knowledge to advanced – through the right channels of learning and sustained practice.
WordPress – As Far As You Want To Take It
Really, the number of WordPress tutorials out there on the web are countless. You can go for days investigating them – including on sites like instantShift.com. However, until you start executing them, you’re still just someone who blogs, and not a WordPress expert. You can continue tweaking and tweaking the powerful CMS until the day you retire – the possibilities are really endless.
Most of all, have fun with it, and pass the knowledge on. Even if you’re the most advanced WordPress developer ever, you’ll find that some specific need you have isn’t addressed in a blog post. If you write that post yourself, you’ll end up helping giving back to the WordPress community who spent countless hours putting together advanced posts such as the the 25 listed in this post.
Image Credits
Its good to see some basic tutorials for novice website users, it will help new upcoming bloggers to set up their own blog and websites.
Thanks for sharing these WordPress tutorials. They are useful for newbies.
Great list thanks man. Just got to find time to go through them.
Cool collection and I have used most of them.
Thanks for share.
Great tuts. I love them, i have already done too much with wordpress, the thing that i have learnt from you is the way you do.
WordPress is one of the most powerful CMS solutions out there and people with demands choose it for their website because of it’s flexibility, customizability and almost unlimited range of features.
Nice list. I need to look into some. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been 2 years with wordpress but i still something new in these tutorials compilation. Thank you!
This is really cool list for WordPress beginners.