Course Overview
Most WordPress sites are not built badly. They are built once and then never maintained — twenty plugins nobody chose deliberately, no backup, a login page anyone can hammer, and an owner who is afraid to press "update".
This course covers both halves: creating the site, and the part almost nobody is taught, which is keeping it alive. Twelve chapters, no coding required, and everything done on a site you own by the end of chapter two.
What You’ll Learn
✅ Setting up: domain, hosting, installing WordPress and getting the basics right the first time.
✅ Content: pages, posts, categories, media, and the difference that trips everyone up.
✅ Design: themes, the block editor, menus and site structure — without touching code.
✅ Plugins: what a plugin costs you, and how to choose four instead of twenty.
✅ SEO: titles, descriptions, permalinks, sitemaps and readable URLs.
✅ Security and maintenance: updates, backups, logins, and what to do when something breaks.
✅ Speed: caching, images and hosting, measured rather than guessed.
The Chapters
1 — What WordPress is. Content management, database plus theme plus plugins, wordpress.org versus wordpress.com. You can say what you are actually choosing between.
2 — Domain, hosting, install. Registrars, hosting, PHP and MySQL, HTTPS. Your own WordPress site is running at a real address.
3 — The dashboard and settings. Site title, timezone, permalinks, users and roles, discussion settings. You have set the settings that are painful to change later.
4 — Pages and posts. Which is which, categories versus tags, drafts and publishing, a sensible page tree. You can plan a site’s pages before you build any of them.
5 — Media. Uploading, sizes, compression, alt text, the media library. Your images look right and do not weigh three megabytes each.
6 — Themes. Choosing one, installing, customising, child themes, and what a theme should not be doing. You can change how the site looks without losing your content.
7 — The block editor. Blocks, patterns, reusable blocks, templates. You can build a landing page that matches a layout you were shown.
8 — Menus, widgets and structure. Navigation, footers, sidebars, homepage settings. A visitor can reach any page of your site within two clicks.
9 — Plugins, chosen deliberately. What plugins do, how to judge one, conflicts, and the cost of each extra. You can justify every plugin on your site in one sentence each.
10 — Forms, contact and integrations. A contact form, notifications, spam, and connecting other services. You receive an enquiry from your own site and know where it went.
11 — SEO and being found. Titles and meta descriptions, permalinks, sitemaps, Search Console, structured data. You can see your site in Search Console and read what it says.
12 — Keeping it alive. Backups, updates in the right order, staging, logins and hardening, caching, and a monthly routine. You have a written maintenance routine and a backup you have actually restored.
Course Highlights
🔥 No coding required — but you will understand what is happening underneath.
🔥 Maintenance is a third of the course, because that is where sites are lost.
🔥 You own the site you build — it is live from chapter two.
🔥 Free, including the test and the certificate.
Who Should Enroll?
- Beginners who want to create and manage their own website.
- Small business owners establishing an online presence.
- Freelancers who want to offer WordPress work and support it afterwards.
The Test and Certificate
Twelve questions across the twelve chapters — posts versus pages, permalinks, child themes, plugin judgement, backups and updates. Register, take a hall ticket, sit the timed paper, and pass to earn a certificate carrying your name, the course and the date.
Sit it now, free: take the practice test for this course. It is scored in your browser and is a self-assessment, not a proctored exam.
Course Duration
📅 4 weeks, twelve chapters, step by step. Free.
🚀 Build the site, and then be the person who can keep it running.
Keywords
free WordPress course, create a website, WordPress customization, website maintenance, WordPress security and backups, WordPress SEO, WordPress for beginners, free WordPress certificate
