This tutorial is dedicated to learning how to publish a blog post on WordPress.
It’s the first in a series of guides for taking your first steps 👣 with WP, or refreshing your memory 🧠.
What are articles for?
If you’re just starting out with a WordPress site, one of the first things you’ll want to learn is naturally how to publish articles 📃.
Articles are a great way to share your thoughts and ideas with your audience, to showcase your news, or even news about the favorite topic you cover on your site.
Articles are the key to keeping your website active and engaging. They are often available right from the site’s home page.
In fact, unlike the pages that make up the “static” part of your site, articles are intended to bring new content to the site on a regular basis.
They form the heart of your blog, and give your visitors the opportunity to interact with you, by leaving their reactions via comments. They can also share your article on social networks.
The articles also feed the RSS feed, a kind of summary to which your visitors can subscribe, to keep up to date with the latest updates.
If we recall its genesis, WordPress was originally nothing more than a blog engine, so blogs remain one of its best specialties.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the steps you need to follow to publish your very first “post”!
Log in to the WP Admin dashboard
Log in to the dashboard. This is usually located at https://votredomaine/wp-admin/.
(if you can’t find a login portal at this Url, it’s been moved to reinforce security).
From here, you’ll have access to all the tools and features you’ll need to manage and administer your web pages.
The left-hand pane lists the essential actions you can perform with WordPress, when you arrive at your dashboard (the backend for the specialists). Click on the “Articles” option.
Access the list of articles
Want to add a new article? Click on the “Add” button at the top of the page.
This will take you to the WordPress Gutenberg editor, where you can write and format your article.
A quick aside: the WordPress editor has been totally redesigned since version 5, and now works in WISIWYG blocks, unlike the old editor (“the classic editor”), which tended to look more like Word software.
The interface of the classic editor is often still present, in one form or another.
It can, for example, take the form of a block in the new “classic editor”. It is then able to collect content prior to version 5, if it has not already been transformed into a block.
Publishing your first WordPress post with Gutenberg
Now enter a title for your post in the “Enter title” field at the top of the page.
This is what will appear as the main title of your post.
Now let’s move on to the body of your article.
You can use the formatting bar that appears when you click inside a paragraph block to style your text, add links and so on.
You can also add images and other blocks, either from the block library or by clicking on the crosses located between two blocks (they sometimes appear when you hover over them if they don’t appear permanently).
When you’ve finished writing your article, it’s time to set some options for its publication.
On the right-hand side of the page, you’ll see a “Publish” button with several options. You can choose to save your article as a draft, schedule it for publication at a later date, or simply publish it immediately.
Don’t forget to assign your article to a category and/or tag, and to insert your front-page image (still in the Articles tab on the right-hand panel).
The latter will be displayed at the top of your article and will be used as a thumbnail to present your post in another part of your site.
When you’re ready to publish your article, simply click on the “Publish” button. Your article will now be online on your website for your visitors to read.
Note that a forthcoming tutorial will present the Gutenberg interface, and in another article we’ll explain how to format your Url.
Finally, optimizing your article’s SEO Onpage will make it easier for search engine spiders to understand your article and index it better.
Before you go…
Congratulations 👏, you’ve just published your first article on WordPress!
With a little practice, you’ll become a pro at publishing articles on your website in no time.
We hope you’ve found this tutorial useful in showing you the basics of publishing articles on WordPress.
Please feel free to comment and give us your feedback. Suggest additions if you need them… And you’re even allowed to express your enthusiasm, if you feel like it 💜 .
Happy blogging 😉!
