WordPress for Beginners: Complete Setup Guide (2020)

Why WordPress Still Dominates the Web

WordPress powers 36.1% of all websites and accounts for nearly 63% of sites running a content management system. Despite its reputation in some circles as insecure or difficult, the reality is quite different. You don't need to be a developer to build a secure, professional site with WordPress.

The real power of WordPress lies in its extensibility. Think of the core platform like a free app — it does a lot out of the box, but you can bolt on virtually any feature you can imagine through plugins and themes. This flexibility means you're not locked into what a single SaaS provider decides to offer. You can save thousands compared to platforms like ClickFunnels, Teachable, or Squarespace, and end up with something that actually matches your workflow.

Choosing the Right WordPress Hosting

Hosting is the one unavoidable cost when starting with WordPress, and it's arguably the most important decision you'll make. Cheap shared hosting might save a few dollars upfront, but it leads to slow load times, security vulnerabilities, and downtime that can tank your business.

For business websites, three hosts stand out. Flywheel offers managed WordPress hosting at $13/month (billed annually) with a custom stack optimized for speed. Kinsta is the premium option at $30/month, delivering top-tier support and a highly customized server environment. For most people, though, Cloudways hits the sweet spot — pay-by-the-hour pricing starting around $10/month with no long-term contracts and no sneaky price hikes after year one.

Cloudways provides one-click WordPress installation and a clean interface for server management. The tradeoff is that their support isn't quite at the Kinsta or Flywheel level, but for the price and flexibility, it's hard to beat. Always start with the smallest server size — you can scale up easily, but scaling down is a different story.

Understanding WordPress Page Structure

Before building anything, it helps to understand how a WordPress page is actually structured. Every page your visitors see has three core sections: the header, the body content, and the footer.

The header sits at the top and typically contains your logo or site name plus the main navigation menu. By default, it appears on every page. The body content is the meat of each page — your blog posts, sales pages, galleries, or whatever you're presenting to visitors. The footer mirrors the header in that it shows on every page, usually containing links to your privacy policy, terms and conditions, copyright notices, and sometimes secondary navigation or social media links.

Understanding this three-part structure makes everything else in WordPress click into place. Once you know where content lives, you can start thinking about how to customize each section independently.

Pages vs. Posts: When to Use Each

WordPress gives you two ways to add content: pages and posts. The difference is subtle but important. Pages are for evergreen content that doesn't expire — your About page, Contact page, or Services page. They don't carry a published date and typically appear in your site's navigation.

Posts, on the other hand, are dated and show up on a dedicated post page (your blog). They're designed for timely content like articles, news, and updates. Google pays attention to post dates, so keeping posts current with relevant information helps your search rankings. Posts don't appear in the main navigation by default — visitors find them through your blog page, related post sections, or recent post widgets.

Creating either one is straightforward. From the WordPress sidebar, choose Pages or Posts, click Add New, write your content in the editor, and hit Publish. The styling comes from your theme, which we'll get to next.

Essential WordPress Settings for Every New Site

Before you start adding content, there are a few settings every new WordPress site needs. Start under Settings > General to set your site name, tagline, and time zone. Getting the time zone right ensures your scheduled posts publish when you expect and emails go out at the correct time.

Under Settings > Reading, you can choose what visitors see when they hit your homepage — either your latest posts or a specific static page. There's also a checkbox to discourage search engines from indexing your site, which is useful while you're still building things out.

The most critical setting is under Settings > Permalinks. WordPress defaults to an ugly URL structure with random numbers and query strings. Switch this to "Post name" immediately. Clean, descriptive URLs like yoursite.com/about-us are dramatically better for SEO and user experience than yoursite.com/?p=123. It's baffling that this isn't the default, but one click fixes it for good.

WordPress Themes: What They Actually Do

Every WordPress site needs a theme, and there are tens of thousands to choose from — free, one-time purchase, and annual subscription options. But themes often oversell themselves with flashy features like sliders and animations when their real job is much simpler.

At its core, a theme controls the basic visual style of your site: fonts, font sizes, colors, and default layouts for pages and posts. You customize these through the WordPress Customizer, which gives you a preferences panel with a live preview. The options available depend entirely on what the theme developer built in.

The modern approach favors lean themes that do the basics well and leave advanced features to dedicated plugins or page builders. This prevents "content lock" — a common problem where switching themes breaks your entire site because features were baked into the theme rather than handled by independent plugins.

Astra is an excellent choice for most sites. It's lightweight, highly customizable, works well with major plugins like LearnDash and Elementor, and has a capable free version. If you need more control, Astra Pro is available at a reasonable price.

Page Builders: Designing Without Code Using Elementor

Page builders have transformed WordPress from a developer-only platform into a true drag-and-drop website builder. While older tools like WP Bakery laid the groundwork, modern builders like Elementor deliver genuine what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing with inline text editing and drag-and-drop blocks.

Elementor's free version gives you 10 basic widgets including headings, text, images, and buttons — enough to build functional pages. You get full control over typography (all Google Fonts included), colors, spacing, borders, and responsive design. When you build a page with Elementor, it overrides your theme's styling, giving you pixel-level control over the layout.

Elementor Pro ($49/year for a single site) unlocks the real power: pricing tables, countdown timers, form builders with direct integrations to MailChimp and ActiveCampaign, and a full template library of professionally designed landing pages. The template library alone can save hours — just insert a pre-built design and customize the text, images, and colors to match your brand.

Every element is fully responsive. You can set different sizes, alignments, and even visibility rules for desktop, tablet, and mobile independently. If a headline looks great at 40px on desktop but needs to be 22px on mobile, you can set that without affecting the other views.

Customizing Your Header and Footer

You have two approaches to customizing your header and footer: using your theme's built-in options or leveraging a page builder's theme builder feature.

The theme approach is straightforward. Through the WordPress Customizer, you can set up navigation menus (Appearance > Menus), swap the site title for a logo, and adjust footer text. Astra makes this relatively painless — click the pencil icon next to any element in the Customizer to jump straight to its settings. You can upload a logo, control its size, and remove the default "Powered by" text in minutes.

Elementor Pro's theme builder takes things much further. Under Templates > Theme Builder, you can design completely custom headers and footers using the same drag-and-drop interface you use for pages. Choose from pre-built templates or start from scratch. Add social icons, contact information, search boxes, and multiple navigation layers. You set display conditions to control which pages use which header or footer — so you could have a simplified header on landing pages and a full navigation header everywhere else.

One important detail: when building headers in Elementor, manually set the HTML tag to "header" on the section element. Elementor doesn't do this by default, and it helps search engines understand your site structure.

Sidebars, Widgets, and Page Layout

Sidebars in WordPress are designated areas where you can place widgets — small blocks of content or functionality. Despite the name, sidebars don't have to appear on the side of your page. They can be placed in the footer, header, or anywhere your theme supports.

Widgets include things like recent posts, search bars, category lists, custom menus, and text blocks. You manage them under Appearance > Widgets in the WordPress dashboard. Drag widgets into your sidebar areas and configure their settings. Most themes give you at least a primary sidebar and a footer widget area.

Page layout options let you control whether sidebars appear at all on specific pages. Some pages — like landing pages or sales pages — work better without a sidebar competing for attention. Your theme's customizer typically offers layout options (full-width, left sidebar, right sidebar) that you can set globally or override per page.

Essential WordPress Plugins for Every Site

Plugins extend WordPress functionality without bloating your theme. The key is choosing focused, well-maintained plugins rather than kitchen-sink solutions. Here are the essentials that belong on every business site.

For SEO, SEOPress handles meta titles, descriptions, sitemaps, and schema markup. It's a lighter alternative to the more popular Yoast, with a cleaner interface and less upselling. AntiSpam Bee tackles comment spam without the privacy concerns of Akismet — it doesn't send data to external servers.

ShortPixel handles image optimization, which is critical for page speed. It compresses images on upload without visible quality loss, and can bulk-optimize your existing media library. For stock photos, the WP Pexels plugin lets you search and insert free stock images directly from the WordPress editor.

HappyFiles adds folder organization to the WordPress media library, which becomes essential once you have more than a handful of images. Stencil is useful for creating social media graphics and blog post featured images without needing Photoshop. And ColorZilla (a Chrome extension, not a plugin) lets you pick exact colors from any webpage — invaluable for maintaining brand consistency.

Managing the WordPress Media Library

The WordPress media library stores every image, video, document, and file you upload. It's simple to use but can become unwieldy fast without some organization strategy.

When uploading images, WordPress automatically generates multiple sizes (thumbnail, medium, large, full) so you can use the appropriate version in different contexts. Using properly sized images rather than just scaling down a full-size image in CSS is important for page speed — a common mistake among beginners.

Featured images deserve special attention. Every post should have one — it's the image that appears on your blog page, in social media shares, and often at the top of the post itself. Set it in the post editor's sidebar under "Featured Image." Choose something relevant and eye-catching, as it's often the first thing that determines whether someone clicks through to read your content.

As your library grows, tools like HappyFiles become essential for keeping things organized with folders. Without it, finding a specific image among hundreds becomes a frustrating scroll through an unsorted grid.

Categories, Tags, and WordPress Taxonomy

Categories and tags are WordPress's taxonomy system for organizing posts. Think of categories as broad topic buckets — like chapters in a book. Tags are more specific descriptors, like index entries. A cooking blog might have categories like "Desserts" and "Main Courses," with tags like "chocolate," "gluten-free," or "30-minute meals."

Every post must belong to at least one category. If you don't assign one, WordPress drops it into the default "Uncategorized" category (which you should rename to something useful). Tags are optional and you can use as many as make sense, though going overboard doesn't help anyone — stick to genuinely useful descriptors.

Both categories and tags generate archive pages automatically, which means they create additional SEO-friendly entry points to your content. A visitor clicking the "WordPress" category sees all posts in that topic. This structure helps both human visitors and search engines understand what your site covers and how content relates to each other.

Understanding WordPress User Roles

WordPress has a built-in user role system that controls what different people can do on your site. This matters the moment you bring on a second person — whether that's a content writer, a virtual assistant, or a client.

The main roles from most to least powerful: Administrator has full control over everything. Editor can manage and publish all posts and pages, including other people's content. Author can write and publish their own posts only. Contributor can write posts but cannot publish — an editor or admin must approve them first. Subscriber can only manage their profile and read content.

For most business sites, you'll want to keep Administrator access limited to yourself (or your developer). Give content writers the Author role so they can publish without being able to modify site settings or install plugins. If you want an approval workflow, use Contributor instead. These role boundaries prevent accidental (or intentional) damage to your site configuration while letting team members do their work.

WordPress Security and Backup Best Practices

Security isn't optional, and the good news is that basic WordPress security doesn't require technical expertise. Start with these fundamentals: use strong, unique passwords; keep WordPress core, themes, and plugins updated; and remove any plugins or themes you're not actively using.

For backup, UpdraftPlus is the go-to solution. It can automatically back up your entire site — database and files — to cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3. Set it to run on a schedule (daily for active sites, weekly for quieter ones) and test a restore at least once so you know it works before you actually need it.

On the security side, WordFence provides a firewall and malware scanner specifically designed for WordPress. It monitors login attempts, blocks known malicious IPs, and alerts you to any file changes on your site. WebARX (now Patchstack) takes a different approach by focusing on vulnerability patching and providing a centralized security dashboard if you manage multiple sites.

The combination of good hosting (not shared), regular backups, a security plugin, and basic password hygiene protects you from the vast majority of threats. WordPress's security reputation largely comes from sites running outdated software on cheap hosting — avoid those mistakes and you'll be in good shape.

What's Next: Taking Your WordPress Site Further

With the fundamentals covered — hosting, themes, page builders, plugins, and security — you have everything you need to launch a professional WordPress site. But this is really just the foundation.

The plugin ecosystem opens up virtually unlimited possibilities: e-commerce with WooCommerce, online courses with LearnDash, membership sites, booking systems, advanced forms, and more. The key is to add complexity gradually. Get your core site running well before layering on advanced functionality.

Focus on creating quality content consistently, optimizing for search engines with your SEO plugin, and monitoring your site's performance and security. WordPress rewards the methodical approach — a well-maintained site with good content on solid hosting will outperform a feature-stuffed site on cheap hosting every time.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.