Below are what I find are the best resources for learning WordPress.

1. WPBeginner: Created by Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner’s purpose is to house tutorials for the WordPress newbie. Since I learned WordPress as I went, I often had and still have a lot fo questions. Most of my questions were answered by WPBeginner. It has articles on the most common WordPress errors, as well as information on plugins, themes, and hosting.

2. Lynda.com: Lynda as fantastic courses taught by experts for each application. You have a few choices for tiered learning for each application, so you can choose the teaching style you like. Lynda has a basic subscription for $20 a month, but I would recommend adding on the exercise files for $10 extra a month. This was you can follow along with the teacher. Morten Rand-Hendriksen teaches a WordPress essential training class covering creating posts and pages, using widgets, and keeping your site secure.

3. WordPress Codex: Surprise, surprise… many of your questions will be answered on WordPress’s own site. Go from Getting Started, to creating posts and pages, to working with themes. This online manual houses almost all the information that you need to know.

I also want to leave some tips for building a website.

1. I hope you choose WordPress as your website platform (content management system), After that, you need to choose a reliable and fast domain and web hosting provider. I currently use Bluehost, but I’ve heard that there are hosting providers that provide a better service for a faster web page load time, for example SiteGround and HostGator.

2.Use WordPress’s quick installation option. You can find this option in your hosting account’s control panel. The installation process is easy enough. I once made the mistake of paying an extra $99 for special assistance with this step, and I didn’t even use it. Each hosting provider has its slightly varied version of the the quick install. For directions of how to do this with Bluehost, following the instructions on WordPress’s site.

3. When choosing a theme for your website, choose one that is responsive (resizes according to the viewer’s device). Have you ever visited a website on your phone or tablet and had a bad user experience due to the font being too small or the page not sizing correctly? That’s because the website did not have a responsive theme. In this mobile-first world, you definitely want a website that is device agnostic. My tip is to choose wisely, and don’t be cheap (I once used a free responsive template that caused much more headache than is worth the money I saved). Here are some of the best responsive templates outlined by Tutsplus, including Total, X the Theme, and Houzez. I’m currently enjoying Divi (Elegant Themes) myself.

4. Spend some time familiarizing yourself with the WordPress dashboard. Pages are where you build your main webpages. Posts are where you write your blogs. Media is where you keep all of your graphics and videos. WPForms are where your forms live. Appearance is where you edit your menus, widgets and theme. Plugins are a critical feature for WordPress and help your customize your website. It’s important to understand the General and Permalinks section of your Settings. Nate Shivar wrote a great post on the WordPress Dashboard and initial settings here.

5. Navigate to the General Settings and check your Site Title, Tagline, Site Address and email address. Make sure that the Site Address matches the domain name that you’ve picked. Then navigate the the Permalinks section to choose your page and blog url structure. I recommend the  Post Name setting which is more seo friendly (gets you higher up on the Google search results page).

6. Lastly, I leave you with several essential plugins (extensions) that will make your life a whole lot easier (since you won’t have to custom code everything).  Install plugins one at a time with time to test in between. I went crazy one day and downloaded many plugins at once, and as a result spent hours troubleshooting which plugin had disabled my Contact form.

• WPForms (or Contact 7 Forms) :Important for converting leads
• Yoast SEO: Important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• W3 Total Cache: Important for page speed since it caches pages (creates static cache pages for each page that is loaded, so that your pages are not being dynamically loaded upon each request). It integrate with a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
• MaxCDN: A CDN provider that works with a caching plugin to deliver cached content via its global servers.
• SEMRush (or another SEO tool): Important for looking up/updating keywords, backlinks, top pages, and other competitor information.
• WPBakery Page Builder (or Beaver Builder or Elementor): It’s essential to have a good page builder for customization and page speed.
• Many more as described in this wpbeginner post

Learn more about WordPress for marketers from Digital Marketing Techie:

Below are my other resources related to WordPress and SEO. Stay tuned or subscribe to emails for more information:

Using WordPress to Drive SEO

SEO Tools