How to customise your new site & make it nice!

Step 4: How to setup a WordPress website & How to customise your WordPress website

Your site is probably going to look a little bit basic and if you are using the Twenty Twenty One default WordPress theme, very green! For this part I will be using the latest Twenty Twenty One WordPress theme, so if you don’t have that enabled please see the ‘Changing your theme‘ section below.

Before all that, let’s go over some basics of what we can change & how we can customise our site.

How to log into WordPress

To do anything in your site you will need to head to your WordPress control centre, in this guide I may refer to this as the WordPress Back office, WordPress Back-end or WordPress admin. You can access this by going to your website’s homepage and adding /wp-admin to the end of the url, for example https://www.example.com/wp-admin.

Here you can use the logins you set when you first created the website. Once you are logged in you will see a relatively simple log in page that contains a black menu down the side.

Changing your theme on WordPress

Imagine a theme as the clothes you were everyday, the underlying basics are the same but you can pick and choose any outfit you want! When learning how to customise your WordPress website, themes are the same sort of concept, the parts you see as the admin will never change so they will stay familiar to you, but you can change your theme to almost anything!

If you are looking for how to setup a WordPress website, we would recommend that you do change the theme as much as you can as its quite common for people to use a base theme and your site will not stand out from the competition.

Head to your WordPress admin page and on the left hand menu select Appearance -> Themes. Here you will see the current activated theme and a couple of options that are included by WordPress, these are always named after the year they were added.

If you like the 3 themes on their feel free to use them, in this guide I will be using the 2021 theme, so feel free to stick along. If you want to change it there are a number of options available to you, both free or paid for.

WordPress has its own theme hub that offers thousands of themes, there are a number of free options available as well. To change your theme, hit the ‘Add new theme‘ button.

You will be taken to a store of types. Here you can search for themes you like, you can use the search bar at the top right to search for your business type to see if there any dedicated themes for that, for example here I searched for a theme for Wood’s Plumbing.

When you find a theme you like, you can hover on it and click ‘Details & Preview‘ and it will load a live preview of the theme on your site. If you like what you see, you can press the blue ‘Install‘ button at the top left of the page and it will download your new theme! Once done you will taken back to the Theme home page and you can press ‘Activate‘ on your new theme.

How to setup a WordPress website & add new content

Now you have your new website, you probably want to add some content to it to get your message across!

Head to your WordPress Admin Area and down the left hand menu you are going to select ‘Pages‘ (Make sense, right?). Here you will see a list of all the pages that currently exist on your website, be default there are usually two, Sample Page & Privacy Policy.

Here you can either create a new page by clicking on the ‘Add New‘ button at the top or you can edit an existing page by selecting one from the list, we are going to edit the Sample Page as it already contains some example content for us.

Click on the blue part of the ‘Sample Page‘ link, this will take you where you can edit that page. WordPress uses something called the Gutenberg Editor, which makes it super easy to edit pages as its essentially generates a ‘Microsoft Word-like’ document editor.

When you load this for the first time a mini tutorial will appear, I would recommend you look through that as it will explain the key parts of the page.

Now we have a simple looking page where we can add and edit content for our website home page! On this page whatever you type will simply be output onto the page, you can add images, headings and much more.

If you look at the top left of the page editor you will see a Blue plus icon. If you click that it will display a list of all of the different blocks you can add to your site. It’s worth noting that in the default WordPress themes, these will probably be all styled and working, but in themes you download (especially free ones) they might not have gotten round to adding all of the blocks.

You can type directly into the page which block you want by typing a forward slash (/) and searching for the name of the block you are looking for.

Once you have made your changes you preview them by using the ‘Preview‘ button in the top right, here you can view your site in desktop mode, tablet or mobile mode. You can also open the preview in a new tab. These changes are currently only visible to you, to make them public you need to press the big blue ‘Update‘ button in the top right.

You will see a small black box appear in the bottom left corner of the page, confirming the updates have taken place, you can use this link to view your new page. If you missed that you select the ‘Page‘ options from the right hand side tool bar and there is a ‘Permalink‘ section which contains your page link.

Remember what you want your users to be searching for on search engines to find your site, you should try and include this keyphase as much as you depending on your content length. A good recommendation if once every 150 – 200 words.

For example if you are targeting people searching for How to setup a WordPress website, then try include that keyphase multiple times.

Changing your site’s homepage

By default, your site is going to think its a blog, after all WordPress is primarily a blogging platform! However, this probably isn’t what you are wanting, you want to show users your new page you just created! When learning how to customise your WordPress website, the homepage is a great place to start.

To change which page your homepage is set to we need to change some settings. Head to your WordPress Admin Area and from the left menu select Appearance -> Customise. Here you will see a side bar with some options and a preview of your website.

To change the homepage, we need select ‘Homepage Settings‘ from the left hand menu. Here, it tells you that, its currently got ‘Your latest posts‘ selected, this means its pulling through the latest posts that where added to the site, in your case it will be the WordPress example post. We want to pick which page is the home page so select ‘A Static Page‘.

You will see there are now two options. You can pick which page you want to be the home page and which page you want to the Blog homepage, if you don’t want to, you don’t need to select a Blog homepage. For this example I am going to select our freshly edited Sample Page.

You can see a live preview of what your new homepage will be, if you are happy with that press the blue ‘Publish‘ button at the top of the left menu to make those changes public. You now have a new homepage that you can control the content of!

Adding a navigation (menu) bar

Now you have a homepage, you probably want to add some more pages, right? If you are stuck for ideas, I’d recommend adding a Contact Page, an About Page & some pages about what sort of services you offer. All of these pages really to making your business look professional and trustworthy.

Using the steps above, go through and create each of these pages as we can’t add a menu bar if there are no pages! Try to get a descriptive page header, a few images & some information about what your business is, when it was founded, what services you offer and how users can reach you!

Now we have some more pages to add to menu bar, head to your WordPress Admin Area and from the left menu select Appearance -> Customise. Here you will see a side bar with some options and a preview of your website.

From here select ‘Menus‘ and it will present you with a list of all of the current menus on the website, for a new site this will probably be empty.

Hit the ‘Create New Menu‘ button and you will be asked to name your new menu, I’d recommend making it something that makes its obvious which menu they are editing as you may have menus at the top and the bottom of the page.

In my case, I’ve named mine ‘Main Menu‘ as it will be the main navigation menu for the site. Select a menu location from the list below, on the next step it will show us a preview of where the menu will go so don’t worry you can always change it again if needed. I’ve selected ‘Primary Menu‘ and pressed the ‘Next‘ button.

Now you can see in the preview your title has moved over to the left, this is because there is now a menu added to the site, but as there are no items in the menu its still empty.

Let’s add some items by pressing the ‘Add Items‘ button. Here you can pick from a list of pages, posts and just about anything else to add to your menu. If you want to link outside your website you can use the ‘Custom Link‘ button as well. Pick some of your newly created pages from here and press the + symbol.

Once done, close the ‘Add Items‘ menu by clicking it again and you will see your menus items have appeared in the top right of the page! You can use this menu to get an idea of how it will work if you want to. Once you are happy with it, hit the ‘Publish‘ button at the top left of the menu to make your changes live to your users!

Remember that it’s important what you call your menu links, you page needs to be easily findable and obvious what it is at a quick glance. For example if you web page is based around How to setup a WordPress website then calling it ‘Website Ideas’ isn’t a great idea.

Let’s make it less… Green?

Whilst you may love the default green colour, it probably doesn’t fit in with your business brand colours! Luckily, we can change all of these colours to something that will look a little better and will reflect your business idea whilst learning how to customise your WordPress website.

Head to your WordPress Admin Area and go to Appearance -> Customise. By now you are pretty familiar with this area of the site. Here there are a number of items that you can use to customise your new site.

To change the background colour, head to the ‘Colours & Dark Mode‘ section, and here you can pick what colour you want your background colour to be. I would recommend having a very neutral colour such as white, light blue or slightly off-white, this makes sure your user’s eyes are drawn to your content and images rather than a bright background.

You can also add a background image, this adds an image behind your content on top of your background colour. Again, I would recommend leaving this empty to keep attention on the parts that matter.

If you need to change your site’s name and tagline that we set up when we created the site, you can do so here as well. Just head to the ‘Site Identity‘ section of the customise menu.

There is also a section here called ‘Additional CSS‘. In this section you are free to add custom CSS that you have written or found online, this can be used to tailor your site specifically to how you want it. For example in here you could add some styling that makes your buttons a certain colour and do something special on hover. If you are new to web development, I’d recommend leaving this section for now.

Make sure once you are happy with everything you have done, you press the blue ‘Publish‘ button to make your changes visible to your users!

How to setup a WordPress website & how to customise your WordPress website

If the WordPress Gutenberg blocks and the Customisation page is not enough for your website there are some other options you can use to give you that extra bit of creativity. There are some pros and cons to weigh up first.

Pros of a page builder

Cons of a page builder

I don’t want to put you off using a page builder as they are a great starting point for you, especially if this is your first website, this is just so you can understand why so much time and effort goes into custom themes being developed. Be sure to check out our future content for more information on how you can start to create your own blocks.

If you would like to install a page builder, you can do this by simply installing a new theme as we did previously in the guide. There are a number of completely free page builders with some offering extra features for a subscription, I would recommend you look at using:

• Elementor
• Divi
• WP Bakery
• Oxygen

Although it could be a good idea for have a page builder for extra functionality but us at How to setup a WordPress website recommend doing everything by yourself where possible.

Extending your site further with plugins

WordPress is great because you take your new website so much further with the use of plugins! Plugins can really help with How to customise your WordPress website. Plugins are miniature programs you can add to your website to add new functionality, this can be new blocks, contact forms, e-commerce functionality, speed updates, SEO guidance and so much more! Read our guide on the top 6 plugins for your new website!

At the time writing this there are over 55,000 WordPress Plugins that are available to add to your site. The great thing is, the majority of these plugins are completely free to use! If not, most of them have a free section and you can pay for the premium features.

All of the plugins all have to have a user-friendly guide on how to set them up and use them including screenshots so it makes it really easy for anyone to add them to their site and get started.

To add a plugin its really simple! Head to your WordPress Admin Area, and go to ‘Plugins‘. Here you will see a list of all of the plugins that are currently on your website whether they are active or not. WordPress comes with a couple of plugins by default, you can choose to use these or not.

Let’s add a new plugin to your website. In this example we will add Yoast SEO which is a plugin to give guidance and extra features to easily add and control your websites meta titles and descriptions that are read by Google.

To start, press the ‘Add New‘ button at top of the page and you will be taken browse the plugins. You can filter by popular, recommended or just using the search functionality. Use the search bar to search for ‘Yoast‘ and then we can select the first one, be aware that some people try to use popular plugin names to get their own near the top of the search rankings. A good way to check if it’s the right one is to view the rating, number of ratings and number of installations.

Once you have found the plugin you want you can press ‘More Details‘ to go to the plugin’s help page which you can use for installation and setup help. If you are happy with that, press the ‘Install Now‘ button.

Once your plugin has finished downloading the ‘Install Now‘ button will change to ‘Activate‘. It’s worth noting that a plugin can be installed on the site but will not be used if it is not activated. So let’s press ‘Activate‘ now.

You should be then taken to your plugins homepage with your newly added plugin now being active on the site. You can then use the plugins web page as a guide to set up and use your plugin correctly. Most big plugins have a settings page that will appear in the left hand navigation bar, or you can use the buttons near the activated plugin.

Some plugins I would recommend that you add to your website are: