WordPress is a massively popular publishing platform – and for good reason. It’s easy to use and endlessly customisable, and even absolute beginners can soon have a professional looking website up and running in a very short space of time. WordPress is also free to use, so whether you are looking to build a simple blog or a complex website for your business, WordPress is a smart choice.
Beginners to WordPress usually need a helping hand to get them started. Although WordPress is very easy to use, there is a lot to learn. This is where WordPress tutorials come in really handy. Luckily there are hundreds of WordPress tutorials available online to teach everyone from beginners to seasoned website designers how to tweak their templates and customise a WordPress website. So if you want to learn some new skills or are keen to make your website stand out from the crowd, here are fifty great WordPress tutorials you should definitely check out.
1. WORDPRESS ESSENTIAL TRAINING
If you are looking for an in-depth training tutorial on how to create a website from scratch, this is an excellent starting point. Morten Rand-Hendriksen from the Lynda.com website explains everything you need to know, from how to publish posts and pages, to customising your website with themes, widgets and plugins. This comprehensive training video will help you get the most out of your site.
2. GETTING STARTED WITH WORDPRESS
YouTube is a popular resource for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of a particular subject and as you might expect there are plenty of videos on there related to WordPress. The ‘getting started’ video created by JREAM is a great place to begin if you know nothing about WordPress and what it can do. The video is fairly simple to follow and will help you with the initial installation followed by setting up pages and managing themes.
3. THE WORDPRESS COMMUNITY
WordPress has a thriving community of people who actively contribute and are only too happy to help newbies on their journey. This article was written with the newbie in mind. The author asked the community what their best advice to beginners would be, so check out the answers and hopefully you won’t make the same mistakes these people did.
4. CUSTOMISE THE WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR
WordPress’s visual editor is very easy to use, but if you need a helping hand it is a good idea to watch this useful tutorial. A lot of users find it hard to switch between the editor and preview modes when writing posts, but this tutorial helps you customise the text editor so you can see the end result without flipping back and forth.
5. SHORT CODES TUTORIAL
Short codes are an integral part of WordPress. The Short Codes tutorial from Smashing Magazine will help you get to grips with how short codes work and why they are so useful.
6. CHOOSING COLOURS FOR A WORDPRESS WEBSITE
Picking a colour scheme might not be high on your list of things to worry about, but it is worth remembering that some colours work and some don’t. This tutorial is helpful to anyone who needs to find the perfect colour scheme for their website.
7. FEATURES POSTS CAROUSEL
If you want to feature particular posts at the top of your blog, this tutorial is important. It uses the Kubrik theme as an example, but the points made within the tutorial are applicable to most other WordPress themes with a bit of modification.
8. THE LATEST WORDPRESS TECHNIQUES
Looking for ways to improve your website? Check out this tutorial for four useful tips on how to incorporate the latest development techniques in WordPress websites, which include help on using icon fonts and the Bootstrap framework.
9. CUSTOM POSTS TUTORIAL
One of the advantages of using WordPress is that you can create a wide variety of custom post types, which means that the world is your oyster when it comes to creating content. In this tutorial, Daniel Pataki from Smashing Magazine tells how to make the best use of custom post types.
10. ADDING AUTHOR IMAGES
Check out this tutorial if you want to know how to add a customised avatar next to posts on your website. It isn’t as hard as you might think.
11. CREATE AMAZING IMAGES FOR A WORDPRESS BLOG
Images are a very important part of a website or blog and this interesting tutorials hows you how to add images in different sizes to create a bit of variety on your website.
12. MANAGING IMAGES
Learn how to better manage your images on a WordPress website with the above tutorial, which contains information on alt and title attributes, managing image sizes, and correctly inserting images in posts.
13. FUTURE PROOFING A WORDPRESS WEBSITE
WordPress expert Jess Friedman explains how to prevent future admins messing up your cool WordPress website. Follow his instructions and you could save yourself a lot of headaches further down the line.
14. HOW TO BUILD CUSTOM WIDGETS
Widgets are small blocks that perform specific functions on a WordPress site and they help you control your theme. Building widgets is not terribly difficult, but if you are a beginner and have no idea where to start, here is a useful tutorial on how to build custom widgets to improve the functionality of your website.
15. HOW TO CREATE A PHOTO GALLERY
Photo albums are useful when your website is primarily visual rather than textual. This tutorial shows you how to create a photo album gallery in your WordPress site without bothering with plugins.
16. CODING WORDPRESS THEMES
There are thousands of themes available for use, some free and others not. To begin with you will probably want to use someone else’s theme, but as time goes on will be more fun to create your own customised theme. For the more experienced user, this tutorial is a good starting point on how to write the necessary code if you want to create a WordPress theme from scratch.
17. CREATING WORDPRESS THEMES
This tutorial contains everything you need to know about creating WordPress themes, including the latest WordPress development techniques. So if you would rather create your own customised theme instead of using someone else’s theme, read this tutorial.
18. THEME DEVELOPMENT
Building WordPress themes isn’t simple, but with the right experience and know-how, it is perfectly possible for amateur developers to come up with themes that are actually pretty good. This tutorial shares lots of tips from experienced developers on the theme development process and how you can avoid the most obvious mistakes.
19. WORDPRESS FROM START TO COMPLETION
If you need a step-by-step tutorial starting with installing WordPress on a server and ending with the final finishing touches to your website design, look no further. Chris Coyier has created a three part video screencast covering installation, structure and the extra stuff. It’s comprehensive and perfect for beginners creating their first website.
20. CREATING A PORTFOLIO WEBSITE
Portfolio websites are useful if you are hoping to advance your career and show off your work online. Thanks to the versatility of WordPress and a wide range of different themes, building an online portfolio with WordPress is not as difficult as you might think. Chris Spooner’s tutorial shows you how to take a simple design and turn it into a portfolio theme.
21. HOW TO CREATE NAVIGATION MENUS
Simple navigation is essential from an SEO perspective and if visitors can’t find their way around your website they are quite likely to click out and go somewhere else. This tutorial is aimed at intermediate developers looking to create a responsive navigation menu using code. There is also a solution for people who don’t want to write code.
22. CREATING A MULTI LINGUAL WEBSITE
Make the most of what the internet has to offer and market your website to a global audience. However, to do this you need to ensure your website is multi lingual, which is where the following tutorial comes in. The best way to do this is with a plugin and the tutorial shows you how.
23. TWEAKING WORDPRESS THEMES
Thanks to some recent WordPress developments, it is now possible to tweak WordPress themes to suit your individual requirements using a command line interface. Newbies like the graphical interface that comes with WordPress, but if you want to get the job done quickly and efficiently, it is worth installing some useful command-line tools – and this tutorial shows you how.
24. HOW TO ADD ICONS TO YOUR WEBSITE
Installing icons on a navigation menu is an effective way of telling site visitors what your content is all about. This can be done using plugins or uploading images, but this method will probably slow your site down. There is of course a better way and the following tutorial shows you how to make the necessary changes to your navigation menu.
25. ADDING TWITTER CARDS TO A WORDPRESS SITE
Twitter cards are a very useful invention. If someone re-tweets your content without properly attributing it to you, you miss out. By ensuring Twitter cards are included in your WordPress setup you get full credit even if someone forgets to mention your Twitter handle. This tutorial shows you how to add Twitter cards via hard coding or a simple plugin. This can help you to get more twitter followers easily.
26. INTEGRATE SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS INTO WORDPRESS
Including social media buttons in a website makes it nice and easy for readers to share your content. Some themes come with social sharing included in the design but most people opt to use a plugin. However, many plugins are poorly coded or include things you don’t need. Also not all of them work with every theme. This tutorial shows you how to integrate the three most popular social media channels into your website, so you can continue to grow your audience.
27. CREATING EMAIL NEWSLETTERS IN WORDPRESS
Email newsletters are a great way of touching base with people on your mailing list. Luckily you can do this directly from a WordPress site if you use MailChimp or Adweber. So if you want to learn how to send out weekly or even daily newsletters read the following tutorial and get the low down skinny.
28. MAXIMISE YOUTUBE ENGAGEMENT IN WORDPRESS
Everyone loves videos, so including some video content in your website is a smart idea. The following tutorial shows you how to create share buttons that overlay video content quickly and easily. Instead of pasting HTML code each time you add a video, all you need to do is write a short code. Yes, it really is that simple.
29. HOW TO PROTECT YOUR WORDPRESS SITE
WordPress is a wildly popular content management system, but with its phenomenal growth has caused a few headaches along the way, not least of which is security issues. There are so many people contributing to the WordPress world that security glitches are bound to rear their ugly head. This tutorial shows you how to protect your site using .htaccess.
30. HOW TO CREATE CUSTOM POST TYPES
Ever wondered what a custom post type is? Well wonder no more for the following tutorial aims to teach you everything you need to know about custom post types in WordPress installations and how to create them. The example used in the tutorial is a book database, but the principles apply to other custom post types.
31. TOP PLUGINS FOR A WORDPRESS BLOG
Plugins make the world go round, but with so many to choose from you might not know which ones count. The following tutorial lists five of the most useful (and free) plugins you will need for your first WordPress installation, thus saving you a lot of trial and error.
32. LEARN MORE ABOUT SECURITY PROBLEMS IN WORDPRESS SITES
WordPress is not immune to security hacks and vulnerabilities, so it pays to educate yourself about the main problem you might experience. This tutorial offers up useful information on the most serious malware infections out there, including malicious redirects, loopholes, backdoors, pharma hacks and drive-by downloads.
33. HOW TO MOVE A WORDPRESS WEBSITE
There will probably come a point when you need to relocate your WordPress website from one server to another. So if the thought of doing this is keeping you awake at night, don’t worry because there is a useful tutorial that will walk you through the necessary steps of transferring your MySQL database manually.
34. ADDING SUBDOMAINS AND ADD-ON DOMAINS
Two domains are always better than one, so if you want to learn how to add a second domain to your existing account, check out the following tutorial. It’s a great way of having two WordPress sub-domains running simultaneously from the same site -perfect if you want a multi lingual site.
35. HOW TO INSERT WIDGETS WITH SHORTCODES
Widgets are very useful things when using WordPress and this tutorial written by Dan Pataki explains how to create your own widgets by writing shortcode. You can use this skill to create intricate elements within your site and it isn’t as difficult as you might think. The tutorial does not contain huge amounts of detail but it is aimed at experienced WordPress users.
36. HOW TO INTEGRATE THE BOOTSTRAP NAVBAR INTO A WORDPRESS THEME
Experienced WordPress users will be familiar with Bootstrap and its benefits during the development process, but if you have yet to use it in one of your themes, this tutorial will explain just how easy it is. The tutorial uses a simple logo and menu navigation bar example and shows you how to modify the Bootstrap code and insert it into your chosen theme.
37. WORDPRESS ACCESSIBILITY
How accessible is your WordPress website? You might not have thought about this, but the more people who can access your site the better it is for you. This short tutorial discusses WordPress accessibility issues and is a useful starting point for developers interested in boosting their skills.
38. A GUIDE TO JAVASCRIPT IN WORDPRESS
JavaScript is incredibly useful for a variety of reasons: it can help you create slick lightbox galleries and content sliders, plus shopping carts and UI elements. If you have no idea what JavaScript is then this tutorial probably isn’t for you, but if you do then read on for some useful tips on using it in a WordPress site.
39. USING CUSTOM FRIENDLY FIELDS WITH META BOXES
The following tutorial is for experienced WordPress users and explains how to add metadata to your posts in WordPress by way of Meta Boxes. This will help to improve the usability of any custom fields you have.
40. RUNNING WORDPRESS SITES IN THE CLOUD
Working in the Cloud is becoming increasingly mainstream for many webmasters, but if you are new to WordPress you may not realise you can build a WordPress website in the cloud. It is a great idea, however, because doing so can help you take things to the next level by allowing you to access some advanced features. So if your interest is tweaked, here’s how to do it.
41. SWITCHING FROM CSS TO SASS
Combining Sass and WordPress is a good way of organising your code and streamlining your daily workflow. The following tutorial explains how you can reduce the repetition and let your computer deal with the more mundane tasks.
42. LEARN MORE ABOUT LAZY LOADING WORDPRESS SITES
If you want to include richer graphical media on your WordPress website, you need to become more familiar with the principles of ‘lazy loading’. Lazy loading helps you beef up your website with richer content without sacrificing page loading performance – and here’s how you do it.
43. HOW TO AVOID MAKING WORDPRESS BLUNDERS
Everyone makes mistakes at one time or another, but making them in WordPress can cause major security issues and significantly slow down your site development process. This resource explains the most common mistakes and shows you how to avoid them.
44. MORE WORDPRESS MISTAKES
Hopefully you have taken on-board the advice offered by the previous tutorial, but just in case you need some more, here are a few more mistakes you should try and avoid when working with WordPress.
45. CUSTOMISING THE WORDPRESS ADMIN AREA
Branding is important for a website. If you are building a site for someone else and you want your client’s branding to appear in the WordPress admin area, here’s how to do it quickly and painlessly.
46. HARNESSING THE POWER OF THE WP_QUERY CLASS IN WORDPRESS
Want to find out how WP_Query can help you list WordPress posts in a multitude of different ways? The following resource tells you more about this important piece of the WordPress codebase – and how best to use it.
47. WORDPRESS CHEAT SHEET
Run into WordPress difficulties? Need a helping hand? Download this WordPress cheat sheet to your computer and you’ll have quick answers to those burning questions when you start developing WordPress themes.
48. WORKING WITH THE GENERICONS FONT IN WORDPRESS
Icon fonts are a great invention. When used correctly, they offer a scalable set of graphics to users of different devices that work on any browsers. Here is a quick guide to the benefits of icon fonts and how to use the Genericons font in a WordPress installation.
49. ADDING A PINTEREST ‘PIN IT’ BUTTON TO A WORDPRESS BLOG
Pinterest is a social media website where users can ‘pin’ images they like and share them with their followers. If your blog features lots of cool images and graphics, it is a good idea to make it nice and easy for visitors to share them with friends. This tutorial aims to show you how to add a ‘pin it’ button to your WordPress blog using a social plugin.
50. SIMPLE CSS HACKS IN A WORDPRESS BLOG
Customising CSS will help you change the look of your WordPress theme, which will help your blog to stand out from the crowd. Even beginners can have a go at customising CSS in this easy to follow tutorial, so read on for five simple ways to work on your CSS.
