10 Free Tutorials to Help You Learn WordPress

There’s a good reason why more than a third of all websites are powered by WordPress. It’s the easiest way to create a beautiful website that you can update as often as you want.

So why not learn WordPress from start to finish by trying one of these in-depth courses or tutorials? Like WordPress itself, these resources are all completely free, so you’ve got nothing to lose.

WordPress is a great platform for blogging, but how do you display your blog posts in the best way? This video teaches you how to:

In WordPress, sometimes the simplest things can be surprisingly difficult. Updating your website header, for example, can be a real challenge with some themes. But Elementor makes editing your site very easy, and in this free WordPress tutorial you’ll see how to use it to create a custom header for your website.

If you’ve started a business, you’ll need to get a website set up as soon as possible, and WordPress is a great way to do that. In part 3 of the Start Your Business With Envato Tuts+ series, Dory Wang shows you how to design a website for your business using WordPress, step by step and page by page.

Why go it alone? Instead of struggling to build a WordPress website from scratch, you can make life easier by using a website builder—a tool that is based on WordPress but makes it easier to customize your site by dragging and dropping elements instead of getting knee-deep in code. Read this article to get an overview of some popular options and discover which website builder to choose.

Forget JPEG: there’s a new game in town now. The WebP image format offers a lot of advantages over traditional formats like JPEG and PNG, such as smaller sizes and faster loading times. Recently it’s become much easier to use WebP images in WordPress too, so it’s a good time to start using them on your website. Watch this video or read the accompanying tutorial to find out how.

It’s frustrating for many users when you have a huge archive of posts, but they can only see a handful of them at a time. Or, conversely, other users may be irritated when they get hit with an avalanche of posts on a single page. It makes sense to give people the choice of how many posts they want to see listed on a single page, but it’s not easy to do that in WordPress. This free tutorial shows you how to accomplish it, with full code samples provided.

Speaking of code, this free course teaches you all about PHP, the programming language behind WordPress. If you want to go beyond simple customizations and make major changes to your sites by tinkering with the code, you’ll need to master PHP, and this course is the perfect way to do that.

Elementor is one of those popular website builders we mentioned earlier. There’s a free and a premium version, and this tutorial shows you the difference between the two. We all like free stuff, but after reading this tutorial, you’ll definitely consider upgrading to Elementor Pro.

And if you’re interested in learning even more about Elementor, why not read this guide to using Elementor templates? It’ll demystify the whole process and show you how to find great templates and use them to save time in your web design projects.

We all know how important social media is these days, don’t we? So if you run a website, of course you’ll want to include social media icons to help your audience connect with you on your chosen platform(s). This free WordPress tutorial video breaks down the process of adding social media icons to a WordPress site, making it simple to understand and implement. There’s also a written version if you prefer.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this roundup of ten free courses and tutorials to help you learn WordPress. If you want to delve deeper into the full Envato Tuts+ library of more than 1,300 courses and 29,000 tutorials, though, you’ll find loads more free WordPress tutorials and courses.

Here are some of the best WordPress tutorials and courses from previous months.

WordPress is free, of course, but usually you have to pay for hosting. So this video highlighting some free WordPress hosting providers is worth watching. Free options often come with some catches, so this video picks five reliable options and points out the pros and cons of free hosting.

Usually, a WordPress theme comes with some customization options, but if you want to dig deep into making changes to fonts, colors, etc., then you need to know CSS. But the YellowPencil CSS Visual Style Editor makes it easy for you to change any aspect of your WordPress site’s formatting using an intuitive visual interface, without needing to get into the code. Learn how to use it in this free WordPress tutorial.

The pages on your WordPress site often change, and sometimes you need to redirect visitors from an old URL to a new one. That’s not always easy to do with WordPress, so watch this free YouTube video for the full instructions.

You may want to customize your WordPress site by editing the HTML, but then find yourself unable to even find the HTML files to edit. That’s because in WordPress, the HTML code is contained within PHP files. Learn how to find and edit those files in this free video.

WordPress Gutenberg gives you lots of flexibility to create innovative page layouts using pre-built blocks. But what if you want to code your own blocks? That’s where you really can start to create unique results and add special features to your websites. Learn how to unleash the power of Gutenberg in this free WordPress course.

Another great feature of Gutenberg is the color swatch that it adds in the WordPress sidebar, so that you can apply colors to text and other elements on the page quickly and easily. But what if you want to change those colors to fit your company branding or just to keep your site design consistent? See how to make custom color palettes by watching this video.

Ah, those error messages can be infuriating, can’t they? Especially when they just say something unhelpful like “Forbidden”. Luckily, this free WordPress tutorial demystifies the infamous 403 Forbidden error in WordPress and gives you several methods of fixing it. There’s also a companion article on fixing the 500 error in WordPress.

Building an educational website with courses and modules, quizzes and forums, may seem like a massive undertaking, but it doesn’t need to be. With the help of the Masterstudy WordPress theme and this free YouTube video, you can get up and running in no time.

On any WordPress site, you’ll find a little file called .htaccess. It’s just a small text file, but it’s incredibly powerful. It sets the rules about who can access your site, what pages they see, and more. You can use it to block unwanted visitors, redirect pages, and more. It can even boost (or harm) your SEO. Read this tutorial to see how it works and how to get the most out of it. And if you like it, why not also read a tutorial on another important file, robots.txt.

One of the things you’ll probably want to do on your WordPress site is change the logo size. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how you go about doing that. After reading this free WordPress tutorial, though, you’ll know exactly what to do.

Get more systematic about designing WordPress websites and themes. Using a design system can save you a lot of time and give you a more consistent, polished end result. Learn all the details of WordPress design systems in this detailed (and free) three-hour video course.

For a lot of WordPress users, SEO means installing a plugin and following its instructions. Although some SEO plugins are very useful, you can also optimize your site without using a plugin. You’ll learn a lot by doing it that way, and you’ll keep your site leaner and less plugin-heavy too. See how it’s done in this free course. Additionally you can use free SEO-Tools to track your performance.

If you run a website for an outdoor attraction or some other business for which the upcoming weather is an important feature, you’ll want to include a weather widget on your site. Doing so is a lot easier than you may think. You can even customize it to make it look great and fit in with the rest of your site. Watch the video to learn how to display the weather on your site using a simple and feature-rich WordPress weather plugin.

How would you like to write your own WordPress plugins? You could sell them on a plugin marketplace, contribute them to the community, or perhaps just use them on your own sites. You’ll learn the whole process in this detailed tutorial, which has recently been updated with fresh instructions and answers to frequently asked questions.

Speaking of frequently asked questions, how would you like to add one of those “accordion FAQ” effects to your site? That’s where you display a list of questions, and when a visitor clicks on one of them, it expands to reveal the answer. It’s a great way to display FAQs, and you’ll learn how to create it in this video.

As hugely successful sites like Craigslist and Gumtree have shown, there’s a big market out there for classified ads. So why not create your own classified ads website covering a new location or industry? Watch this video to discover how to get your site up and running quickly and easily using the Lisfinity WordPress plugin.

Let’s start at the beginning. With this free two-hour video course, you can learn WordPress from the ground up. You’ll discover how to install WordPress and then use it to build and customize your site and create various types of content. Give it a try!

If you don’t have time to watch two hours of video, then try this quick-start written guide instead. Rachel McCollin takes you through the process of creating a WordPress site, including choosing a web host, setting up the site, choosing and customizing a theme, and using plugins.

Looking for something a bit more advanced? Try this free WordPress course on plugin development. It’s a comprehensive guide to creating your own custom plugins from scratch!

If you want to convert visitors into customers, you’ll need a landing page: a special, highly focused page that’s designed to persuade visitors to take a particular action, like buying something or signing up to your mailing list. Read this free WordPress tutorial to learn how to create one from scratch, using custom code. (Or check out How to Create a Landing Page in WordPress Quickly for a code-free alternative.)

It’s not just artists who need portfolios. No matter what line of work you’re in, a stylish portfolio website showing off your work in a visually compelling way can help you sell yourself and land the next great gig. Learn how to get a WordPress portfolio site set up in just one hour in this free course with Adi Purdila.

Moving a WordPress site from one hosting provider to another can be tricky. In this useful tutorial, you’ll learn exactly how to do it correctly, so that all your data gets safely transferred and the site appears in all its glory in the new location.

If you have a site with complex navigation, a simple one-line menu just isn’t enough. Enter the “mega menu”, a useful solution that lets your visitors find their way around all your categories and sub-categories quickly and easily. You can buy mega menu plugins, but this free mega menu tutorial shows you how to do it yourself. Or this one helps you do it with a free WordPress plugin.

We’ve all seen them, haven’t we? Those “pay walls” that appear to section off particularly valuable content on a website and make you pay to access it. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a paid section in your own site, using a free WordPress membership plugin. Find out how.

Let’s get back to WordPress basics again with the simple tutorial that teaches you how to make a contact form using a free WordPress plugin. You’ll see how to set up the options you need and then display your form on your site. And you’ll also get recommendations for more advanced plugins if you need something specialized. Read the free tutorial.

WordPress has its own default media player these days, so why bother with a music player plugin? What do they give you that the standard WordPress option doesn’t? And what about directly embedding audio players from other sites? This article runs you through all the options, clearly explaining the pros and cons of each. Find out more.

Want to learn about something other than WordPress? With Tuts+, you can learn how to use Photoshop, master photography, beef up your video and graphic design skills, and much more. Search the full Tuts+ library to find exactly what you need.