How To Use WordPress

WordPress is a very popular CMS, and is used by over 70 million websites worldwide! WordPress is renowned for being user friendly, however, there are still parts of using WordPress that can be confusing.

We have designed this FAQ page and the subsequent knowledge PDFs to help guide you through some of the most common issues that people face when they are developing their WordPress website.

If you have any questions about WordPress, or you can’t find an answer to the question you are searching for, please get in touch with us on 01257 429217 and we may add your problem to our knowledge base.

This post will be covering issues such as:

How To Change A Password Via The Database?

There may come a time when you need to reset your password, but can’t remember how to get to it. The good news is that you can reset your password inside the database.

To change a password in your database, first, you need to find your database in your hosting panel and navigate to the wp_users table.

Here you can see the usernames and passwords of all registered users on the website. To change the password, click on the user that you want to change, find the password section and edit the password, make sure that the md5 option (encryption) is selected, then update. This will change the password for that user.

How To Change A Theme On A WordPress Website?

To change a theme in your WordPress website, first, you need to find the theme tab in the left-hand-side menu of your WordPress website. The theme section is in Apperance > Themes.

In this tab, you will see a selection of different themes. If you would like to look at more available themes, press the ‘add new’ button at the top of the screen. To preview a theme you think may look good on your website click on the selected theme and click preview.

Installing your WordPress theme is quite simple. Click onto the theme and click the ‘Install Theme’ button. To activate the chosen theme return to the theme menu, click on the theme you have just installed and click activate.

For more info on how to change a WordPress theme, click here.

How To Add Items To A Menu?

WordPress will initially add all pages that you create to a menu. However, you may want some control over how your menu looks and what is displayed there.

Go to Apperance > Menus and you will see the options to create a new menu or to add and remove menu items, create dropdown menus and change the location of the menus to appear in different pre-specified places (depending on the theme).

On the right hand side of the screen will be a selection of differnet items you can add to a menu, pages, posts, categories etc. Just tick the items you wnat to display on the menu and they will appear at the bottom of the menu. To rearrange the position, just drag and drop. TO makeit a dropdown menu of anither menu item, drag it underneath then to the right a little. This will create a dropdown menu for you on that part.

If you would like more details on adding menu items please take a look at our guide.

How To Install Plugins On your Website?

To install a plugin on your WordPress website, navigate to the ‘Plugins’ tab on the left-hand-side menu and find “Add New’. Then find the plugin you would like to install on your website either via a search, or if you have downlaoded the plugin seperately, there is a ‘instal plugin’ option near the top left of the screen.

Click ‘Install Now’ on your selected plugin to begin installing it. Then you must activate this plugin. To do this click activate on your chosen plugin. Your plugin will now be active on your website.

For a step by step instructional guide that goes into more details, click here.

How To Create A Blog On Your Website?

WordPress was designed with blogging in mind, so creating a blog on a WordPress website is pretty straightforward. The first task is creating a page that is designed to hold all the blog posts.

Go to pages and create a new page (if a blog page isn’t already created) and give it the name that you want your blog holding page to have.

Then navigate to the settings tab on the left-hand-side menu and click on reading. Select the page that you created as the blog holding page. Now you can start adding blog posts. To do this navigate to the posts section on the left-hand-side menu then click add new. You can now start writing your blog posts.

For a step by step instructional guide that goes into more details, click here.

How To Deal With Comment Spam In WordPress?

Comment spam can be a really annoying issue to deal with on your blog. Comments are a great way to start a conversation and generate interaction between you and your community. Unfortunately, this can and often is abused by underhand SEO spammers who will try and place links on your comment section to go to their spammy website selling knock-off rubbish!

You can turn off comments on your blogs in Settings > Discussion, to prevent any future blogs from getting spammed.

On already existing blogs, go to your posts, where all yourblogs are listed, click ‘quick edit’ then untick ‘Allow Comments’ this will prevent the post from allowing comments to be added.

How To Add A Contact Form In WordPress?

Interacting with users of your site is a great way to build relationships. The conventional way of allowing users to contact you is by leaving a contact email address. This, however, leaves you a target for email scrapers meaning your inbox gets filled with junk.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. Adding a contact form is a great way to allow users to interact with you whilst making sure that your inbox doesn’t get flooded with spam.

Many themes now come with built in contact form functionality, but if yours doesn’t, don’t worry, you can always downlaod one – for free – from the plugin library. Gravity forms and Contact Form 7 are both very good and recommended.

You can add a contact form plugin by navigating to plugins > add new.

How To Add A Store In WordPress?

Having an online store on your WordPress website is a great way to start making money from your website by selling things! The most popular E-Commerce solution on WordPress is a plugin called ‘WooCommerce’ which is by far one of the best options.

To install the ‘WooCommerce’ plugin navigate to plugins>add new and search for ‘WooCommerce’.

How To Make A Page SEO Friendly?

Having pages that are optimised for search engines (SEO friendly) is a great way to rank higher in search engine results. Meaning that you can attract people who are actually interested in the content of your website.

WordPress is very helpful in terms of SEO straight away, but to tweak any settings such as page titles and meta descriptions, you will need to install a plugin.

The plugin that we would recommend is called the ‘Yoast SEO’ plugin.

To install this plugin you must navigate to plugins > add new and search for ‘Yoast SEO’.

For a step by step guide on how to make pages more SEO friendly. Please click here.

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