Learn WordPress: Beginner to Advanced Tutorial Guide Compared - 2026

WordPress themes control every visual aspect of your site: layout, typography, colors, and the overall structure of pages. A theme is separate from your content, which means you can change themes without losing your posts or pages. Free themes are available directly from the WordPress theme directory; premium themes usually offer more design options and dedicated support.

For a standard site, choosing the right theme upfront saves significant time later. The following tutorial explains how WordPress themes work and how to choose one that fits your site’s purpose.

As mentioned above, plugins give us additional functionality that WordPress or the theme we are using don’t offer. Plugins are totally optional and you do not need them in order to run a website.

With that said, the chance of finding a WordPress site with no plugins being used is highly unlikely. It’s true that experienced developers rather write code themselves instead of adding plugins to their sites, however there are things that it just doesn’t make sense to write from scratch. A great example for a plugin like that would be a contact form. There are plenty of excellent contact form plugins out there, there is no reason to write a totally new one. Another great example would be an SEO plugin. There are a few perfectly good ones on the market (and free needless to mention), so why not just use them?

You could read all about WordPress plugins, where to find them and how to install them in our post.

The backend of any WordPress site is placed within the /wp-admin/URL. You can’t have a WordPress site without knowing everything there is to know about the wp-admin. Installing themes and plugins, creating users, setting your permalinks structure, adding posts and pages, moderating comments etc.

The following post is a full tour of the wp-admin and everything there is to know about it. If you are new to WordPress this is a serious MUST for you.

Once you’ve covered themes and plugins, the next step is learning the platform professionally. WordPress is used at every level, from basic blogging to enterprise sites at major media companies. Understanding how to build themes, work with the database, and extend functionality through code opens up a much larger range of projects.

The following resource covers what professional WordPress development involves and how to get started if you want to move beyond drag-and-drop setup.

Now that you know a bit of code, you can start doing things a bit more complex that adding already built themes and plugins. How about creating a theme all by yourself? To tell you the truth, even if you’ve never written a line of code in your life, you can follow each step in the following tutorial and succeed. It would obviously be better if you knew some code but you could totally do this with no previous knowledge.

The following post will teach you how to take a blank file and turn it into a real WordPress starter theme that you can use for your next projects.

You’ll learn things like WordPress functions, file structure and some PHP.

A complementary post to the previous one. Many web developers rather building websites locally and then uploading them to their server when they’re done. This post will take you on the XAMPP journey. We will show you how to download XAMPP, run in correctly and create a local WordPress installation.

Now that you have a WordPress site you built on your own, you need to put it somewhere. That’s where web hosting comes into play. We gathered up a few of our favorite hosting companies for you to go through. Choose the one that fits your needs and signup because the next step, we teach you how to take your website and upload it to the web.

By now you should have at least one local WordPress website on your computer and you should have chosen a WordPress hosting plan to host your site/s on. In this post we’ll teach you how to migrate your local WordPress installation and move it to your new hosting plan. Not that this tutorial will work for you also if you have a live website and want to move it to a new host with no downtime.

This is where things get interesting. Up until now you learned how to use posts and pages, but how about taking that up a notch? This is where this combo can help you.

• Custom post types gives you the ability to add any kind of posts, it can be “food”, “news”, “movie” – you name it.
• ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) gives the custom post type even more functionality – you can add any type of information on each post type.

Read the following post to learn more.

Page templates & post templates give the previous tutorial even more functionality. When adding new posts or pages you can choose different types of templates. For example – when adding a new post on your blog, choose a full width template, a template with a contact form in the footer etc. The sky is the limit.

Read the following tutorial to learn all about it.

Throughout the previous tutorials we’ve mentioned the functions.php file quite a bit, it makes sense since it’s one of the most important files in a WordPress theme. In the following post we share a few functions.php tips that can give you an edge as a web developer.

WordPress isn’t necessarily considered the fastest CMS around. With that in mind, there are many things you can do in order to fix that. Just follow the 12 tips in the following post and your WordPress website will be quicker that ever.

Now that you have a running and live website, you’ll probably want to start following it and checking who uses it, how they reached the site, etc. The way to do that is with Google Analytics. In the following post we teach you how to add a Google Analytics code to your site simply and start to tracking your users.

Now that you are a WordPress savvy developer, it’s time to start making your website look presentable and pretty. One of the best ways to completely change the way a website looks is by adding good looking images. You would be surprised how many royalty free images you can use on your website. The next post lays out all of your options for completely free images.

Now that you have a good looking site and completely functional, it’s time for some good ol’ SEO. The following post will teach you a whole lot about promoting your website organically on Google. Just follow these tips are you are good to go.

The following post is the most extensive one on the entire site. This post is a MUST if you are serious about promoting the websites you build. SEMrush will give you every bit of information about your competitors’ website and marketing tactics. Go through the post, understand what part of the tool is relevant for you and then go check it out.