There are dozens of reasons why WordPress is a top platform that’s been dominating the content management game for decades. Its simplicity of use, rich variety of features and easy scalability. These are among the main reasons why millions of websites have chosen to run their websites on WordPress.
Facts and Figures
- WordPress powers more than 35% of the World Wide Web.
- Also, 30.3% of top 1000 websites in the world run on WordPress.
- There are 70 million new content pieces posted on WordPress every month (27 posts every second!)
- The term ‘WordPress’ is searched for almost 3 million times every month.
Know Your WP Stuff
Before you start managing your content on WordPress, it’s best to get acquainted with some of the main terms and concepts this platform uses. It’s especially important to know which post type to use when publishing a piece of content. WP sometimes uses a term that means something different in other contexts.
The first unit of content is the almighty post. While this concept is somewhat intuitive in blogging and publishing content, a post is basically a building block of WordPress. It’s a piece of content that’s going to be published on your Blog Posts page.
Unlike other blogging platforms, blog posts are sometimes not automatically presented on your home page. You actually have to set up a designated blog posts page where your posts go (this is usually done automatically). Then set up the location of this page in your theme customization dashboard.
WordPress Themes
Most themes will have two options for their homepage:
- Static Landing Page
- Blog Posts
If you opt for the first one, your visitors will always be shown the same page when they visit your homepage. However, you can set up the static landing page with plugins and widgets that will actually show your newest blog posts. This is what most websites choose to do in order to present more visually appealing homepages and dynamic content.
If you go with ‘Blog Posts’ your homepage will be a collection of your newest posts. Whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically jump on the top of your homepage.
The next term is the Custom Post Type. This option allows users to set up, well, custom post types because WordPress developed to provide much more than just posts and pages. A CPT can be any type of content: a page, post, navigation menu, revision or attachment and you can give them any name you want.
Next, a page is a crucial component of a WordPress page. A WP page can be filled with written content, but can also present many other types of content. Images, galleries, videos, widgets, and so on. A page will always have its own URL that comes after your WordPress site domain.
Organize Your Content
Now that you know how to call those little building blocks of WordPress, the next step is to learn how to organize this content systematically and present posts and pages to your visitors in a user-friendly way.
Let’s take a look at three ways to organize your content:
- Categories
- Tags
- Menu (Navigation)
Just like their name says, categories are where you put your content in to determine its topic, theme or overarching theme. They are a great way to organize your content and offer different categories in a menu to provide a clear overview of your topics to readers. As an example, this article would be categorized in a ‘Guides’ category on a website that deals with WordPress topics.
Tags are an SEO-friendly way to let your users (and search engines) know what your content is about. They usually appear at the bottom of every post and website owners add cluster widgets which show visitors a cluster of topics they can choose from. For example, a tag for this article would be WordPress content management.
Finally, menus are the ultimate way to ensure your visitors find their way around your website and pick between the two organizing structures we’ve mentioned above (categories and tags). Try looking around the web for a bit: you would be hard-pressed to find a website that doesn’t have a homepage menu, in one way or another. For many websites, it’s the basic navigation mode for the entire website and the easiest way to find pages and posts.
How to Add a New Post on WordPress?
Now, let’s get to the actual practice of posting and managing content on WordPress.
Even if you’re a first-time user, you will immediately see why WordPress is so popular for publishers: it’s as simple as a content management platform can be, very user-friendly, and if you get stuck somewhere, there are a bunch of helpful resources you can refer to.
To create a new post, refer to the left side of your WP Admin dashboard under ‘Posts’ and select ‘Add New’. You will be presented with the screen above.
In a WP post, there a lot of formatting options. You can also use the ‘Add Media’ button to add images, videos, galleries and other multimedia content.
If you use a WordPress-building plugin like Elementor or Beaver Builder, your New Post page will look somewhat different. Also, you will have a lot of additional options to make your content more dynamic and visually appealing.
Now, let’s take a look at the right side of the ‘New Post’ dashboard. Here is where you will find most of your content management options.
Firstly, you can decide whether you want to save the content as a draft (to return to it later), to send it to review (if you’re only writing content for a website owner that has to approve your content before publishing), schedule it (publish it at a later time) or publish it (right then and there).
Next, you will also have the option to select your post type from different options – standard, audio, image, video, quote, and so on. Here, you will also see all the custom post types you’ve created.
To organize your new content piece into categories or tags, simply add them in this same section and they will be presented in your menus or widgets.
Assign Content Tasks to Writers
No matter if you work with in-house writers or freelancers, you can easily assign content pieces on your WordPress dashboard without granting them admin access to the website. In other words, they will only have the option to write the article they’re supposed to, save it, publish it, and that’s about it. This is called the Author option on WordPress.
If you need to find writers who you can assign Author roles to on your WP dashboard, you can use some of these services: Fiverr (a service marketplace with content writers, SEO writers, copywriters and many more), TrustMyPaper (writing service website to hire writers for your WordPress site), Freelancer (freelance database where you can post what you need and receive bids for free) or Studicus (another great writing service).
Use Plugins to Improve Your Content
Plugins are one of the most amazing things about WordPress that make this platform so beloved among content publishers. They allow you to enrich your website and admin dashboard with many helpful resources and skyrocket your WP site to success.
When it comes to content management, there are a lot of useful plugins you can install and activate to start to benefit from them.
For many content managers and publishers, SEO is one of the top concerns: what’s the use of good content if no one sees it? If you don’t have a huge budget for paid marketing (whether social media or paid search engine ads), can you expect thousands of visitors to come to your website every day? Well, with proper search engine optimization and a lot of time and effort – yes. Luckily, WordPress makes it much easier to perform high-quality SEO because there are a lot of plugins designated to do just that. One of the best in this field is definitely Yoast SEO, used by over 5 million WordPress users every month.
There are also WordPress plugins that can help you make your posts more captivating and dynamic, create better navigation menus, include interactive media and much more.
Conclusion
There’s no doubt about it: WordPress is awesome! It’s the content management platform that’s been powering the Internet for decades now. And the best part: even if you’re an absolute beginner, it’s very easy and simple to start working on WordPress.
Before you start, familiarize yourself with some of the features and options we’ve talked about in the article, such as posts, custom post types, pages, categories, tags, navigation menus and plugins. As soon as you start using all of these in practice, you will see that the learning process for WordPress is very fast and you’ll get better by the day.
Marques Coleman is a blog writer at BestEssayEducation and WowGrade. He specializes in marketing and copywriting. Moreover, Marques is an avid traveler and always tries to learn something new