Here are some tips for editing your WordPress website.
Logging In
Logging into WordPress and trying some edits is a good way to learn. It is quite easy and you can always revert to a previous copy of the page, if you run into trouble.
To begin, your login for the site is at :
https://yousitesname.com/wp-admin/
login: username
pass: password
When you login, you'll see a menu on the left. This is the WordPress dashboard!
No need to worry about all the different buttons, to start with the two you are best looking at are "Media" and "Pages".
Clicking "Media" will show you all the images on the site. If you click "Add New" you'll be able to upload new photos/pictures here.
If you click "Pages", you'll see all the pages on the website. This is the most important area for you.
Regular Pages and Elementor Pages
Most of the pages on the site are what I call Regular Pages, they use the standard WordPress editor to edit them. You might find a few other pages, such as the home page, are “Elementor Pages”, meaning they use the special Elementor graphical Editor instead. You can tell these pages, as they have "Edit with Elementor" by the side of them.
Editing Regular Pages
If you click a "regular" page name you'll be able to edit it. Pick a plain page with perhaps a single image or gallery to start with.
The Page Title is at the top. You'll then see the page content follows - the paragraphs of text and the images or gallery that make up the page.
What you have before you is the standard WordPress editor, it's called Gutenberg and is meant to be a bit like Word, but for webpages. You can type/cut/paste text like Word.
In this editor, each part of the page is made up of "blocks" and these blocks can be added or removed to build up the page. If you hover over the different paragraphs or the image, you’ll see a little "+" sign appear. Click that and it will ask if you want to add a new "block", such as a Paragraph or a Quote or an Image(there are many block types, even Image Galleries and things). Best idea is to try these things out and see what happens.
If you click in to edit a paragraph, you’ll notice the 3 dots in the menu bar, if you click those you can remove the paragraph completely by choosing “Remove Block”.
If you add or edit an image - click the photo itself and you'll see some buttons above it. There you'll find you can change which side it "floats" on or change the image itself. Also on the right side of the page you'll see options to re-size the image.
To be honest, the best way is to play around with it and try things out.
Once you've made a change to two, click the "Preview" button(top right) to preview how your new page will look (nothing will be changed on the live version yet).
If you get stuck or want to leave the page as it is, click "Pages" on the left again, click "Leave" when asked and it'll take you back to the Pages list.
NOTE: If you click "Update", that will update the page, live on the website. If you want to view the live page, there's a "View Page" button in the the top-right menu bar(best idea is to right-click that and choose Open in New Tab).
There are lots of tutorials on WordPress for this editor on YouTube eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9yIMQTUk04
Editing Elementor Pages
The Elementor pages just use a different graphical editor to build the page and so are a bit more complicated. You can drag/drop elements around the page, but it does take a while to get used to it. I'd recommend not changing much on these pages just yet, BUT if you click on the text sections of these pages, you'll see they are quite simple to edit. The "Update" button is at the bottom left.
To get back to the regular WordPress Dashboard, you have to click the menu bar on the top left and choose "Exit to Dashboard" to return to regular WordPress from this editor.
I'll leave it at that for the moment, as again, it's really a case of trying things out and learning that way.
Hope you find this helpful,
Thanks,
JR – Feb 2020
