This page refers to the old version of the WordPress editor. It is still available and known as the Classic Editor, but we recommend using the new Block Editor.
Whether you are editing pages or posts, the editor is identical. You can edit an existing page to update it, or you can create a new page. To get started you can create a new page. This new page will not be visible on your site unless you create a link to it or add it to the menus.
Add a new page
To get started select Pages on the left sidebar. This will show you a list of your existing pages and also give the option to Add New.
Set the page title
The first thing to do with a new page is to give it a title. This will be displayed at the top of the page and it will also show on the browser tab when the view the page. The title of the page you are reading now is Editing Content.
After you enter the title, a label appears below it, Permalink, which gives the URL used to access the page. WordPress will generate this automatically based on the title, but you can edit it (click the Edit button next to it) if you want a snappier URL. The permalink for this page is editing-content but I could have changed it to simply editing if I wanted something shorter. Note that if you edit the title subsequently, the permalink will not change automatically but can still be edited manually.
Edit the page content
You are now ready to start editing the page content. The main panel on this page looks much like a very basic word processor with a toolbar allowing you to apply a limited range of effects – as previously explained, most of the styling is done by the theme.
By default you will enter your text in Paragraph style, which is what makes up most of the text on this page. You can also choose from several different heading styles to divide your page into sections.
Individual words and phrases can be made bold or italic (but not underlined) and text can be coloured. You can see a range of other effects on the toolbar. Hover your mouse over a button to find out what it does or look at the Easy WP Guide page. If you don’t see the lower row on the toolbar, click the Toggle Toolbar button. In the screenshot here it’s the one with a square box around it – the box indicates that the additional toolbar is active, so if you can’t see the toolbar you won’t see the box either.
Be careful with pasting
If you paste text from a Word document then be careful that Word’s formatting doesn’t get pasted in as well. Although it may seem appealing to use all the existing effects it will cause problems when viewed on other peoples’ computers and especially on mobile devices. There is an option on the toolbar to Paste as Text (clipboard with a ‘T’ on it) which you should use when pasting in formatted text. Once pasted in you can use the WordPress styles to style it as you wish.
If you want to include a table you should use TablePress instead as it produces web-friendly tables.
Adding Pictures
This is where the Add Media button comes into play. There is a good description of this in Easy WP Guide too, which explains how to add new photographs or select existing ones. There are a few things to add to that description.
If you left- or right-align an image then on a wide screen the text will flow round it on the opposite side. If you centre-align it then the text remains above and below the image.
The Link To option controls what happens when you click on the image. The most useful options are None which means it is just a plain picture, or Media File, which will open the image at full size in a picture viewer.
After you have inserted an image you can still change these options. Click on the image to open a popup menu. You can change the alignment, or click on the pencil icon to edit all the image settings.
When viewed on a small screen (e.g. a mobile phone) the left- and right-aligned images images will instead be centred as there is no space to wrap text around them. If you prefer these images to be left-aligned in this case you can do so by clicking on the pencil icon, then showing Advanced Options and add an Image CSS Class of narrow-left.
Adding a gallery
As well as adding single pictures you can also add a gallery. This is an array of pictures and it is particularly useful for showing a set of pictures of an event, or a list of committee member photographs. In both these cases you would show a set of smaller thumbnail images on the main page, and have the link set to Media File which allows you to open any image in the picture viewer and browse through the full size images. You can find out more on the Easy WP Guide page. There is an example of a gallery on the Ambridge demo site.
Shortcodes
If you edit an existing page you may well see text in square brackets such as [[table id=1 /]]. This is what is known as a Shortcode and it is used either to insert an object defined elsewhere, or to create an effect. There is a full list on the Shortcodes page.
Links
It is often useful to create a link from one page to another. This is discussed in more detail on the Menus and Links page.
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