How To Create A Blog Post With WordPress

About 40% of the Internet is built on WordPress as the underlying platform. There’s a very good reason for that – it’s simply the best blogging platform ever made, and it’s fairly easy to use.

This guide will show you all of the exact steps how to create a blog post in WordPress.

Starting a new blog post

Every blog post in WordPress starts with the “Add New” button.

The button can be found when you:

  • hover over the “Posts” item in the left side menu (the button will appear as a submenu item)
  • on the top of the Posts page, right next to the title of the page

When you click either of those, you are taken to a new, empty post.

The new post

Every new blog post starts out with only two content elements: the title, and a single empty block.

The title is a necessary component of every blog post. Once the post is published, it will usually become an H1 HTML element (the top-level header of the document), and it will be the strongest signal that your blog post sends to both your audience and search engines about the topic and the contents of the blog post.

Aside from the title, a blog post in WordPress is made out of blocks.

A block is a single unit of content within the blog post. There’s a large number of block types available in WordPress available natively, and also, you can create your own block types or use other ones that come from plugins.

However, most of the block types are not all that important, and you will find yourself using the following block types most of the time:

  • paragraph
  • heading
  • list
  • image
  • video
  • embed

And out of these, the paragraph will be by far the most common block type you use.

In fact, I would go as far as saying that the fundamental building block of every successful WordPress blog is the paragraph.

The paragraph is simply a piece of text that should concisely represent a continuous idea. It can be as long as you want it to be, but for the greatest results, I’ve found that paragraphs that are between 2 and 4 sentences, and no longer than 6-7 sentences, tend to work the best.

By default, when you start typing in an empty block, you start creating a paragraph block.

Also, whenever you’re in a paragraph block, and you finish it, and you press the Enter button, you leave the previous paragraph and you are taken to a new one below the old one. And, of course, whenever you click inside a paragraph, you can edit it.

The paragraph in WordPress results in a “P” HTML element when the blog post is presented to the user.

The post can have as many blocks as you need.

If you wish to remove a block, you can either delete all of its contents or select the “Remove block” option from the options menu. You can also change the type of the block, although you will probably not use that option too much.

The order of the blocks in your blog can be arranged as you need. You can easily move a block up or down using the appropriate buttons for that.

Each block type will also support a different set of settings. For example, for a paragraph block, you can choose the font size, the text and background color, add an HTML anchor or CSS classes for that paragraph, etc.

Text formatting

No matter what block type you’re working with, whenever you are working with text, you have several options to format the text.

Besides the font size, font color, and background color, which are options at the level of the block, you can format every word or letter separately. All you have to do is select the piece of text you wish to format, and choose one of the several options available.

You can choose between:

  • bold font
  • italic font
  • add a hyperlink
  • make the text look like keyboard input
  • superscript superscript
  • subscript subscript
  • strikethrough
  • change the text color

You will probably find that you will mostly use the linking, and occasionally using the bold or italic font, and you will not really use the other formatting options all that much.

Links

Hyperlinks, or links, are a very important part of every blog post.

Adding a link in WordPress is very simple:

  • choose the portion of the text you want to be the anchor of the link
  • click the Link button
  • enter the full URL of the web page you wish to link out to (or, begin typing to search through your existing posts and pages, and select one if you’re looking to link to a web page of your own website)

Post settings

Besides the block settings, WordPress provides the option to adjust some settings for the entire post itself.

The most important settings at the post level are the permalink (aka the URL slug), the categories of the post, and the featured image.

Occassionaly, you may want to play around with the Layout of the post (if your theme allows it), and potentially with the visibility, the publishing time, etc.

Permalink

The permalink, or the URL slug, is the last part of the URL for that blog post, the part that usually comes after the trailing slash after the domain name.

At first, WordPress will set the permalink to be a variation of the blog post title itself, except that it will replace empty spaces and special characters with hyphens.

You can sometimes go with that option, but most of the time, you will want to set your permalink to be exactly the primary keyword you’re trying to rank for with the blog post. Simply enter the keyword and replace the empty spaces with hyphens.

Categories

You blog will probably have several different categories for the topic it is covering.

You will be able to select one or several of the categories for each blog post you write. The type of the blog post will play a large role here (product review, list article, informational article), but the content itself will probably be even more important.

Featured image

Your blog post will have several images in it.

However, there’s one special type of image, that may or may not be within the blog post itself, but it will be used to represent the blog post outside of the blog post, so to speak, as in the blog reel, or when the blog post is shared on social media, etc.

That image is known as the featured image. It is usually a smaller sized version of the first or the main image for the blog post, but not always.

Saving a draft

To not lose progress on your blog post, you can save drafts of it as often as you’d like. Clicking the “Save draft” button in the top right corner of the editor will do this, as well as hitting the “Ctrl + S” shortcut.

So, if your browser suddenly shuts off, for example, or the power runs out, or the Internet connection is cut, you will have saved your work up to that point.

Also, chances are, your WordPress environment will already be set up in a way to perform this procedure on its own at a certain time interval.

Previewing your post

If you wish to see how your blog post will look to your readers at any point, you can click the “Preview” button in the top right corner, and then select the “Preview in new tab” button. This will take you to a new tab where WordPress will generate the content of your blog post as it would look to the reader.

Publishing

When you are done writing the blog post, you just need to hit the “Publish” button in the top right corner, and your blog post will be live on your blog. If your pre-publish checklist is active, you will have one last chance to review a few items before you publish, but then, when you confirm and hit the publish button again, your blog post is out there, on the Internet, working on getting you traffic.


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