How to Use WordPress – A Simplified Tutorial

WordPress, a software for interacting with your website, makes setting up a website as well as interacting with it, making changes to it, and adding new content as easy as can be. If you’re new to WordPress, however, consider this article on how to use WordPress to know everything which you need to know from changing the appearance, adding plugins, making posts, etc.

I want to mention that I’ve created a video which shows me walking through each of the things I’m going to mention in this article which you can check out at the end of this article in case you’re a more visual person.

Okay, first thing’s first: the theme. Your theme dictates the overall appearance and basic functionality of your site. There are thousands of free themes out there which you can find by clicking on the “appearance” tab from your dashboard and click the “install themes” tab from there. You can search by keyword and filter your results by a lot of features from that page.

You can also click “upload” in case you have purchased a premium theme. All you have to do is find the zip folder which contains the files for that theme and upload that as a whole and the theme automatically installs and is set. From there you just click activate and that theme and its appearance goes live on your site.

Also in the appearance tab you can toggle with some settings for your theme which will vary from theme to theme.

Next I recommend going into your “settings” tab and specifically the “permalinks” choice. Switch from “default” to “custom structure” and add the following code as follows: /%postname%/

This makes it so that your new posts or pages will use the title as the URL for the new content. For example, if your post was called “how to use WordPress” your URL would go “”. This is the ideal structure as far as search engine optimization goes as opposed to using some random numbers or the date as your URL structure.

If you click on the “plugins” tab, you can interact with existing plugins which you have or add new ones. Plugins give your site all kinds of functionality to make your job easier. All-In-One SEO is a nice plugin which makes search engine optimization a largely automated afterthought. Akismet is another plugin but this is one which comes preinstalled with WordPress and works to combat spam comments which people leave so that they do not appear on your site.