WordPress posts are a content type that allow you to add a date and category to the content in order to sort them meaningfully for the user reading them.

It means you can publish regularly without worrying that your users might not think the content is recent (we are addicted to new content!) and also allow your user to find what they need quickly.

When building a brand new WordPress website, it’s pretty typical to only have your head in the ‘Pages’ section of the site and not realise that there is a ‘Posts’ section.

This post is going to give a quick tour and show the basics for how to create your own blog post using WordPress.

I’ll also walk you through some of the key elements that you’ll need to include in your post to make it stand out.

Where to find the Posts section

First up is how to find the Posts section in your WordPress admin.

Look to the left hand side of the admin towards the top left and it will be one of the first menu items that you see.

It’s before the Pages section after after the Dashboard in my view:

Once you click on that option, the menu on the left hand side will open to show further menu links.

You can jump to a page showing all of your posts, create a new post, see the post categories that you have created and see the post tags that you have created:

The ‘All Posts’ view will show all of your posts in a list and also give you a shortcut button at the top of the screen to create a new post.

You can see from my view here the following data associated with each post:

Title
Author
Categories
Tags
Date

If you don’t have the same view as above or everything is squished up in your view, you may have plugins that add adding extra columns of data.

You can see there is a fifth column on the screen above adding info from an SEO plugin called Yoast SEO.

You can change this view anytime in the Posts sections by clicking on the ‘Screen Options’ drop down at the top of the screen here:

You can add or remove any of the columns of data by checking or unchecking the relevant boxes:

How to create a new Post

Now you know where the Posts section is on the site, here’s how to create a new Post.

There are a few ways to do this in WordPress (as always – there seem to be many ways to do many of the functions on this glorious platform!)

You can either click the ‘Add new’ option on the left-hand side menu.

Or click the ‘New Post’ button at the top of the Posts page.

Or click the + symbol at the top of the Admin in the black bar (you’ll be able to see this bar no matter what page you are viewing on the site as long as you are logged in).

Once opened you’ll see the new WordPress editor view. If you don’t see a view like the view below, then you’re still using the Classic Editor (learn more about it here).

Note that you’ll need to add a title for your blog, content, a category and ideally a featured image that will pull into the blog feed page on your website (I don’t use this for my blog by the way).

These 4 elements are the very basic you’ll need to get a blog post posted.

Without a category, you’ll be assigned the ‘uncategorized’ category by WordPress, without a title you’ll see the label ‘(no title)’, without content you’ll not provide any value to your user and without an image you may spoil any blog feed that you have set up in other areas of your website.

To publish the post , hit the blue publish button in the top right of the screen or you can schedule the post to publish at scheduled time by clicking the blue ‘Immediately’ link to the right of ‘publish’:

How to edit an existing Post

All of your posts, whether live or in draft, will live in the Posts section discussed above.

You can edit an existing post by hovering over the edit link in this view and clicking it to go to the editor.

You can also open up the actual post on the website, and as long as you are logged into the WordPress admin, by clicking on the ‘edit post’ option in the top black bar.

So that’s the basics of how to create a blog post in WordPress. Hopefully you have enough info to go and create your first post or add a post to your website if you haven’t done so in a while.

I am writing 100 blog posts in the month of May 2021.

Be sure to follow me over on Twitter to know when they come out as I’ll be posting there first as I go: https://twitter.com/heyvickijakes