The Ultimate Guide to WordPress

WordPress. You might have heard of it, you might not. Either way, this article is going to provide an overview of what it is and who can benefit from it. WordPress is a topic that the team at This is Fever specialise in, and this guide is perfect for anyone interested in learning something from a new perspective.

So, if you’re a WordPress novice who wants to find out more about the content management system powering over 40% of the internet’s websites, then you’re in the right place. However, if you’re an expert looking to refamiliarise yourself with the basics, or see how someone else thinks about WordPress, then you’re also in the right place.

How does WordPress work?

What is a Content Management System (CMS)?

WordPress is a content management system, but what does that mean? A content management system (CMS) allows you to separate the content on your website from the design and functionality aspects, allowing for the content to be more easily managed.

This means that a user with less technical experience would be able to create, edit, manage, and publish content, despite not having extensive, specialised knowledge. WordPress is the most widely used content management system, for a variety of reasons.

It has options for free or paid plans, an interface that is user-friendly, a large plugin library, and a huge (and engaged) online community. It is secure and high-performing, while also having fair pricing so that it can be accessible to a wide range of people.

At This is Fever, we utilise WordPress’ capabilities as a CMS to build intuitive, user-friendly websites. We focus on the creation of custom themes and the integration of plugins that will enhance the management of content and the functionality of the site.

What are the basics of installing WordPress?

When WordPress is installed on a server, it sets up the essentials that it requires for the site to function, from the necessary files to the database structure. It creates tables in a database in order to store content and configuration settings. These tables act as a way to store things like content, user information, and settings for the site.

To install WordPress, you can either manually install it from WordPress.org and follow their installation instructions, or you can utilise a one-click installation, as provided by many web hosting services. This is Fever have built over 150 websites – that’s a lot of WordPress installations!

What is the WordPress Admin Dashboard?

The management of the backend of each WordPress site is done through the WordPress Admin Dashboard. It is an interface that allows you to manage your website. The Admin Dashboard is used to create, edit, and delete content on your site, such as posts, pages and media.

It gives you the option to browse themes and plugins, as well as install them and customise them to your needs. Speaking of customisation, it also allows you to adjust the settings for things like reading, writing and discussion.

Additionally, you can use the Admin Dashboard to add, edit and assign roles to the people who need to access the backend of your site (e.g. your team). The dashboard is catered to suit a variety of technical abilities, meaning that managing the content on a WordPress site is achievable for the less technically adept.

What are the key features of WordPress?

User-friendly interface

As described above, the WordPress Admin Dashboard is designed to be as user-friendly as possible, meaning that content management can be straightforward for non-technical users. It provides a visual editor to allow you to write and format content without needing to be confident with HTML.

Customisable themes

There are thousands of themes available on WordPress, some of which are free, and some premium. These themes allow you to set your website apart, giving it a unique and professional look. You can install themes easily from either the WordPress collection, or from third-party sites.

The WordPress Customiser allows you to alter themes in order to have them better match with your branding and design preferences. The customiser also offers a live preview of changes, so that you can immediately see how your modifications to colours, fonts, layouts, etc. will look on your site.

Extensive plugin library

There are over 50,000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory, and this means that you can add just about any functionality that you could possibly think of to your website. The can range all the way from advanced e-Commerce solutions like WooCommerce to translation tools like Polylang.

Plugins can be installed and activated from the Admin Dashboard, and the extensive choice available means that you can enhance the capabilities of your site without needing to write masses of custom code.

SEO-friendly

Search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices were taken into account when WordPress was built, and this means that it is far easier to get websites to rank well in search engines. Clean, semantic code is generated by WordPress, and this is easy for search engines to index.

This, combined with the utilisation of plugins like Yoast SEO (which provides high level SEO features such as XML sitemaps, keyword optimisation, and meta tags), can have a great impact on your site’s rankings. You can optimise your content and improve the visibility of your site, therefore driving up organic traffic.

Responsive design

A large number of the themes on WordPress are responsive. What this means is that they are able to automatically adjust to look the best that they can on all devices, so your site can look just as great on a mobile phone as it does on a desktop. As usage of mobile devices increases, it is becoming more important that websites can adapt to suit a variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Making sure that your website is responsive is important as it improves its accessibility, as well as the fact that it boosts user engagement, reduces bounce rates, and makes it more likely that users will interact with your website content. To read more about responsive websites, check out our article on how to make a responsive website.

Media management

Uploading, managing and displaying media files on your website is simplified by using WordPress. It has a built-in media library that allows you to upload files using a drag-and-drop feature, as well as organise them into folders.

Images can be directly edited within WordPress, with the ability to crop, resize and rotate images being included. Posts and pages can have media inserted into them with minimal effort, and you can create galleries to show multiple images. A variety of file types are supported by WordPress’ media management system.

Community and support

There is a large and active community connected to WordPress, with a large amount of people contributing to forums, documentation and development. The members of this community provide high levels of support for other members, giving guidance to users at all levels.

There are also a variety of courses, tutorials and blogs that are dedicated to spreading information and insights about all things WordPress. Most of the time, if you have a question about a WordPress project, there’s somebody out there who is willing to help you out.

This is one of the many reasons we use WordPress at This is Fever – we don’t want our clients to be locked into proprietary software that only we can work on!

Security

WordPress puts a lot of emphasis on the importance of security, regularly releasing updates with security patches designed to protect against potential threats by addressing existing vulnerabilities. There are also a number of security plugins (Wordfence, Sucuri, etc.) that can provide advanced features.

These features include firewall protection, malware scanning, and login security, to name a few. You can also make sure that you follow best practices for WordPress security in order to boost the defences of your site. These include updating regularly and using strong passwords.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how to keep your WordPress site well defended, then feel free to check out This is Fever’s article on WordPress security. In the unfortunate event of finding that your WordPress website has been hacked, keep calm and consult our guide on what to do in that situation.

What can you do with WordPress?

Content creation and management

As I touched upon previously, WordPress is packed full of features to help you manage your website content effectively. I mentioned that the built-in media library is incredibly helpful for adding content to your posts and pages, but what is the difference between the two?

WordPress allows you to create posts, which are primarily designed for the purpose of blog and news articles. They are displayed most often in reverse chronological order, and can be categorised, tagged, and archived. This makes posts very useful for the publishing of regularly updated content.

Pages, however, are more static. They include “About Us” and “Privacy Policy” pages, as well as many others. They don’t use tags or categories, but can be placed into a hierarchy, with parent and child pages.

Speaking of categories and tags, WordPress allows you to use these in order to organise your content. Categories help you to group related posts together, while tags allow you to associate content in a more granular way. Both categories and tags help to improve the ease of navigating your website, and boost user experience.

Design customisation

The basics of themes in WordPress were featured earlier, but here is a more in depth look. Simply put, a theme controls the presentation of your site’s content to users, through the use of colour schemes, typography, page layouts, and more.

These individual elements come together to create a cohesive appearance throughout your website. There are thousands of themes to choose from, and they can be edited to suit your needs even more effectively by using the WordPress Customiser, as explained earlier.

However, preset themes aren’t always the best suited option for every website. Themes themselves are fine but hand-coded bespoke themes, like the ones we design at This is Fever, will be more lightweight as they are only made up of the code you need for your website, rather than being filled with a load of bells and whistles that you might not even use.

Extended functionality

After mentioning plugins multiple times already, it seems only right to focus in on them, especially considering just how much they can extend the functionality of a WordPress site. By adding new features, or modifying existing ones, plugins can enhance the capabilities of your website without needing custom code.

Some of the key uses for plugins have been talked about already, but here’s a closer look at a few of them…

• e-Commerce: A plugin like WooCommerce can transform an ordinary WordPress website into an online store. It offers features like shopping carts, product listings, inventory management and payment gateways, allowing your website to become a fully functioning eCommerce store.
• SEO: Yoast SEO is an example of a search engine optimisation plugin that allows you to improve your site’s visibility and search rankings. It offers tools like meta description creation, the generation of XML sitemaps, and readability analysis, all in order to optimise your website content.
• Contact Forms: A plugin that allows you to create custom contact forms is Gravity Forms. It offers various field types, drag-and-drop form builders and the option to integrate your forms with email marketing services, so it is easy to collect information from users.
• Security: There are also plugins dedicated to ensuring your site’s security, such as Wordfence and Sucuri, and they provide protection against brute force attacks, malware, and other threats to your website. They also offer features like login security and activity monitoring, for an extra layer of defence.

User management

As a website owner, you might want to delegate responsibility for sections of the website to your team. This is where WordPress’ user management capabilities come into play. Site administrators are able to control access and capabilities for the different users working on the website. WordPress does this through the use of ‘Roles’.

Roles act as a way to define a user’s responsibilities within the website, as they give the site administrator the ability to manage each user’s access to tasks like writing and editing posts, as well as creating pages or categories, moderating comments, and even managing plugins, themes, or other users. The allowed capabilities of each role are shown here:

Additionally, the Yoast SEO plugin mentioned earlier can open up these roles even further. With Yoast installed, you can assign the roles of SEO Editor and SEO Manager, which allow users to interact with the Yoast interface.

Who can benefit from WordPress?

Bloggers

The original purpose of WordPress was to act as a blogging platform, and it is still one of the best tools for bloggers to use. The fact that it is easy to use, and has powerful features for content management, means that it is ideal for both personal and professional blogs.

The flexibility that WordPress provides is perfect for allowing bloggers to extensively customise their sites and add whatever features they need (social sharing buttons, SEO tools, etc.).

Businesses

Many different sizes of companies use WordPress, and from a variety of industries. Its eCommerce support from plugins such as WooCommerce make it incredibly popular for online stores, and its scalability means that it can grow alongside a business.

Businesses can create dynamic sites that are tailored to their unique needs through the use of features like membership plugins, advanced custom fields, and custom post types. An example of this is This is Fever’s redesign of Stokes Sauces’ eCommerce website, where they boosted their reach and integrated with third-party systems to increase their options going forwards.

Developers

The open-source nature of WordPress is something of great value to developers, as it means that they are able to build themes, plugins and applications in a custom way. It is also very useful that WordPress has such an engaged community and extensive documentation, both of which make it easier for developers to collaborate and find solutions.

Nonprofits

The low cost of WordPress means that it is well suited for nonprofit organisations’ websites, which they use to accept donations, engage with their communities, and spread their messages. Additionally, plugins can be utilised to aid event management, social media integration, and the implementation of donation forms, all of which will allow the organisations to reach wider audiences and better establish their online presences.

Non-profits such as Sea Change Sailing Trust are great examples of the benefits that WordPress sites can provide to charitable organisations. In fact, their current WordPress site was donated to them by This is Fever as part of our 2022 Christmas campaign. To read more on this, check out Sea Change’s blog post about the website.

Educational Institutions

Some schools and universities utilise WordPress’ ability to integrate with learning management systems and effectively handle multimedia content in order to create informational websites, online learning platforms, and student blogs using WordPress.

It can be used to manage student registrations, as well as create courses and resources. This can also extend to e-learning sites such as the Skills for Health site, which was built by the team at This is Fever.

Artists and Creatives

A range of creatives, including photographers, designers and writers, use WordPress as a way to professionally present their work. There are themes and plugins that can be used to develop portfolio sites that allow creatives to showcase their work.

Additionally, features such as custom post types, sliders and galleries are all well suited to helping artists to attract work from potential employers or clients by highlighting their past projects. These features can be seen to have a great impact on Creative Colchester’s website, a hub-style site designed by This is Fever, which acts as a beacon and creative resource for Colchester’s businesses and individuals.

If you feel that any of this applies to you, and you’re interested in getting started with WordPress but don’t know if you’re in a position to do it alone, then don’t worry – This is Fever are here to help.

Feel free to check out our design and development services or get in touch to find out what we can do for you. Additionally, you could check out our upcoming webinars that cover a range of topics related to WordPress and other subjects, located on our webinars page.

If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about WordPress from a technical perspective, then read on to find out about some of the key technical aspects of WordPress, from PHP to ‘The Loop’.

What are the key technical aspects of WordPress?

What is PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor)?

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open-source scripting language, and it powers platforms like WordPress, Facebook, and Wikipedia. It utilises server-side scripting, executing on the server and then generating dynamic content for the web browser.

It runs on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS, and can be embedded within HTML code in order to add functionality to web pages. It is commonly used with databases such as MySQL for developing data-driven websites. The team here at Fever use PHP to create functionalities and integrations that are bespoke, ensuring that each client’s specific needs are met.

What are MySQL and MariaDB?

Speaking of MySQL, what is it? MySQL is the open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is used by WordPress. It organises data into tables in order to allow for easier management of relationships between different data sets. By utilising Structured Query Language (SQL), WordPress can query, update and manage this data.

MySQL is high performing, scalable and reliable, meaning that it can effectively enable WordPress to handle large amounts of data and high user loads. When a page is requested by a user, WordPress uses PHP to query the MySQL database, so that it can fetch the necessary information and display it on the website.

An alternative to MySQL is MariaDB. It was created by the original developers of MySQL and offers similar functionality. It can be used as a replacement for MySQL in WordPress environments, as it too is fully compatible, and can be seen to have improved performance and features.

What is the GNU General Public Licence version 2 (GPLv2)?

WordPress is licenced under the GNU General Public Licence version 2 (GPLv2), meaning that users are able to run, study, share and modify it, as it is free software. The same goes for any WordPress themes and plugins. If developers are distributing WordPress or work derived from it, then they are required to provide the source code.

The GPLv2 promotes an open-source community where work done by developers can be shared freely, allowing people to collaborate and contribute to the platform, for example by creating new themes and plugins.

What is ‘The Loop’?

‘The Loop’ is a system that is used by WordPress in order to display content when it is requested. If you were to picture the content on your website as a library, where each post is a book, then the Loop is the librarian.

When a user puts in a request (for a page, for a category of posts, etc.), the Loop queries the database, looking for content that meets the requirements of the request. One by one, it then presents these to the user so that they can find what they are looking for.

For example, if you were to go to This is Fever’s knowledge hub archives, and select the ‘WordPress’ category, then the Loop would search the database for articles tagged as being WordPress related content and present them to you. The content that the Loop shows can be customised by adjusting things like the order in which you want the posts to be displayed to users, or how many posts you want shown.

Overall, the Loop makes it very easy to present users with the content that they want in an up-to-date and well-structured manner.

By Stanley, Junior SEO and Content Specialist