How to edit content on your WordPress website
After designing a WordPress website for my clients, they often ask me “how can I add or edit the content?” This brief tutorial is meant to teach you the very basics of logging in and changing content. Keep in mind if you do anything outside of the context of this tutorial you can actually crash your entire site (which is VERY bad). Make sure you have a very recent back up of your site if you are feeling adventurous and decide to click buttons that I haven’t instructed you to.
First we will need to log into your website:
Note: Click the images to view larger pictures as needed. To log into a WordPress website you need to type this into your web browser where the URL goes www.YourSite.com/wp-admin
Of course you will need to put your own website URL in there. If done correctly you will be at the login window which will look something like this:
From here your web designer will have needed to create a user account for you with sufficient privileges to edit the pages. After providing the proper credentials and pressing “log in” you should see a page similar to this:
It doesn’t look anything like the site your clients will see, this is where you are able to perform updates, and with the proper credentials, add content etc. From here there are several ways to get to a page that you want to edit, I will provide one method here. Look for the home button in the upper left corner, hover over it to open the fly out menu to click the “Visit Site” button as pictured above. This will take you too a version of the website that looks like what you would expect it to look like.
The only difference now is the dark area at the top as pictured above, this lets you know that you are “logged in” and can make edits to your pages. From here you will need to navigate to the page that you would like to edit.
Now that you navigated to the page you wish to edit, you can press “edit page” which will once again change the view to look something like the image below:
Navigate to the section labeled “Page Builder” and you will see the different “modules” that your site was designed with. They are color coded for easy reference. In the image above there is a full width module color coded purple, and normal width section color coded blue. You can also read the different modules that make up each section, for example in the image above we have 3 text modules and a contact form module. If I wanted to edit one of the text modules I would open them up as explained in the following paragraph.
If I planned on changing the first text module verbiage I would click on the 3 lines in that module to open it up as scene in the picture above.
Once opened you will see the text that makes up that specific text module in that section of the page you are editing. From here you can make any changes you like and have a somewhat familiar text editor look and feel. Once the changes are made you still have two steps to finalize it or else no changes will have actually been made. Press the Save button as seen in the picture above.
After you press “Save” you still need to navigate to the top right side of your page to press the “Update” button to actually commit and go live with your changes.
