WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world. According to W3Techs, WordPress is used by 58.8% of all websites as of April 2021. That’s a staggering statistic considering there are over 1.5 billion websites on the internet.
There’s a reason for this popularity. WordPress is an incredibly powerful platform that is also relatively easy to use, especially if you have some basic web development knowledge. It’s also free and open source, which means there is a large community of developers who are constantly improving it.
In this complete WordPress tutorial for beginners, I will show you how to get started with WordPress, from installing it on your web server to using it to create beautiful and professional looking websites. Even if you have never used WordPress before, by the end of this tutorial you will be able to create a website that looks something like this:
Before we get started, I just want to point out that this tutorial is aimed at those who are new to WordPress. If you already know the basics of using WordPress, then you might find it a bit too simplistic. However, if you are brand new to WordPress or even website creation in general, then this tutorial should be perfect for you.
Installing WordPress
The first thing you need to do before you can start using WordPress is install it on your web server. If you don’t have a web server yet, don’t worry, I will show you how to get one set up later in this tutorial (it’s actually very easy).
Assuming you already have a web server up and running, the first thing you need to do is download the latest version of WordPress from their website. At the time of writing this tutorial, the latest version is 4.9.8 . Once you have downloaded the ZIP file containing WordPress, extract it somewhere on your computer (I usually just create a new folder on my desktop).
Now that WordPress is extracted and ready to go, we need to upload it to our web server so that people can access it from the internet. The easiest way to do this is with an FTP client such as FileZilla . If you don’t already have an FTP client installed on your computer, go ahead and download and install FileZilla now (it’s free).
