One of the many benefits of using WordPress is how simple it is to create a post on WordPress. With its origin as a blogging platform, WordPress has designed, developed, and continually improved its platform to make it an efficient way to post blog articles to a website.
To add a new post, log into your dashboard and follow these steps:
- From the dashboard, hover over “Posts” and click on “Add New”
- Enter in the title of the post. This is the heading customers will see on the website and in social media and will also be used by search engines for SEO. Be sure it includes the posts keywords and is professional.
- Type the text in the body of the post. Make sure to use proper grammar and punctuation and use keywords as appropriate. If typing a lengthy post, I suggest typing it in Microsoft Word or Notepad first and then copying and pasting it into WordPress.
- If including media, click on the line you’d like the media to appear on. Click “Add Media” above the body of the post.
- Choose the item from your Media Library if you’ve already uploaded it, or click on “Upload Files” and find the file. Fill in the alt tag and description. If you want the image to be captioned on the webpage, enter in the caption.
- Click “Insert into Post”
- Excerpts – If you want the excerpt of the post to be different than the first few sentences, type a custom excerpt in this field.
- Send Trackbacks – If the post mentions another blog or website, enter their URL in this field. This can help with SEO, especially if they also trackback to you.
- Discussion Field – Choose whether or not you’d like comments to be allowed on this post.
- Trackbacks and pingbacks should be checked most of the time as this could drive more visitors to your site and improve SEO rankings.
- Featured Image – The featured image is the primary image in the post and will be displayed in social media. Click “Set featured image” and choose the image to include. Typically it will be an image that is in the post, so you can use the dropdown to select “Uploaded to this post”. Ensure the attachment details are filled out as described in the media section above and click “Set featured image”.
- Tags – Enter individual keywords into the Tags field.
- Category – Choose the category for the post to appear under. Depending on your theme and site configuration, this may affect what pages/menu headings the post appears on.
- Check spelling by clicking the “ABC” checkmark above the body of the post and then proofread the post and review for ‘readability’.
- Publish – You can choose to publish immediately, or choose a future date and time. You can also save a draft if you aren’t ready to post it yet or would like to preview it first. If you’re creating multiple posts, I suggest spacing out the publishing dates, especially when posting to social media.
- Click on “Publish” or “Schedule”.
- Now that you know how to create a post on WordPress, it’s time to start writing!
