How to Use WordPress: Your First Week

Most guides on how to use WordPress hand you a tour of the dashboard and leave you to work out the order. The order is the whole thing. Two of the decisions below are cheap to make on day one and expensive to reverse on day thirty, and the majority of the frustration new WordPress owners report comes from doing them in the wrong sequence rather than from any single screen being hard.

Budget six to twelve hours across the week to reach a competent basic site. That is our estimate rather than a measured figure, and it assumes an hour or two most evenings rather than one heroic Saturday. Nine phases, in this order.

Phase 1 — Install WordPress

Every host that sells WordPress hosting has a one-click installer, and in 2026 there is no reason to do this by hand. Sign up, point it at your domain, and you will have a working install in under ten minutes. The genuinely famous five-minute manual install still exists in the documentation; it is a rite of passage rather than a requirement.

Two things to get right while you are in the host's control panel. Use a real email address you check, because password resets and update notices go there. And note whether your plan takes daily or weekly backups — entry-tier plans at the budget hosts take weekly ones, which means a bad week can cost you six days of work. If yours is weekly, plan on an independent backup plugin in phase seven.

Phase 2 — Choose a theme type, then a theme

At Appearance → Themes you are making a bigger decision than "which one looks nice." There are two kinds of WordPress theme and they give you completely different editing experiences.

A block theme unlocks Appearance → Editor, where your header, footer, templates and site-wide colours and fonts are all edited visually in one place. A classic theme gives you the older Customizer plus separate widget and menu screens, and no site editor at all. Most themes sold before 2023 are classic, so a theme that looks perfect in a marketplace listing may drop you into an interface that no current tutorial matches.

Default recommendation: pick a block theme. It is where the software is heading, the free directory has good ones, and switching between theme types later means rebuilding layouts rather than reskinning them.

Phase 3 — Set permalinks before you publish anything

This is the one people skip and regret. Go to Settings → Permalinks and choose Post name, which produces URLs like /sample-post. Do it now, before a single page is published.

The reason is simple and unforgiving: your permalink structure is your URLs, and changing it after you have published breaks every link that already exists — internal links, external links, anything already indexed. Fixing that afterwards means a redirect map you did not need to write. WordPress ships defaulting to day-and-name, which buries your pages under a date they do not need.

The screen offers Plain, Day and name, Month and name, Numeric, Post name and Custom structure, plus optional category and tag bases. Post name is the standard choice for anything that is not a news archive. When you save, a writable .htaccess file gets you "Permalink structure updated." If the server cannot write it, WordPress shows the rewrite rules and asks you to paste them in yourself.

Keep this one in your pocket: simply visiting the Permalinks screen flushes WordPress's rewrite rules. It is the standard first fix when a newly created page returns a 404 for no visible reason.

Phase 4 — The five settings that actually matter

The Settings menu has dozens of options and you can ignore most of them for months. These five you cannot:

1. Site Title and Tagline, at Settings → General. The tagline ships as "Just another WordPress site" and it will appear in search results and browser tabs if you leave it. Write a real one or empty the field.
2. Timezone, also under General. Wrong timezone means scheduled posts publish at the wrong hour, which you will discover at an inconvenient moment.
3. Homepage display, at Settings → Reading. Choose between a static page and your latest posts. Business sites want static; publications want the post feed.
4. "Discourage search engines from indexing this site," same screen. Confirm it is unchecked at launch. Installers and developers tick it during builds and forget, and it is the single most common cause of "my new site isn't in Google."
5. Comments, at Settings → Discussion. Decide now whether you want them, and if you do, require approval for the first comment from anyone. An unmoderated comment form is a spam magnet within days.

Phase 5 — Pages and posts are different things

A page is standing content with no date and no category: About, Contact, Services, Privacy. A post is dated, categorised content that flows into an archive: articles, news, updates. WordPress treats them differently in templates, feeds and navigation, and the mistake that costs time is building your service pages as posts, which drops them into a blog feed you then have to fight.

Build pages first, at Pages → Add New. Home, About, Contact and one page per thing you sell is a complete small site. Posts come after, at Posts → Add New, once the structure exists to hang them on. Delete the sample page and the "Hello world!" post while you are here.

Phase 6 — Menus, and the two places they hide

This is where more first-week users get stuck than anywhere else, and it is entirely because the answer depends on phase two. On a classic theme, menus live at Appearance → Menus: create a menu, tick the pages to add, assign it to a display location, save. On a block theme that screen does not exist. Navigation is a block — open Appearance → Editor, edit the header template, select the Navigation block and add your links there.

If a tutorial tells you to visit Appearance → Menus and the item is not in your sidebar, you are not missing anything. You are on a block theme and reading classic-theme instructions.

Phase 7 — Install a small number of plugins, carefully

Go to Plugins → Add New — labelled "Add New Plugin" in recent versions, with a screen title of "Add Plugins" — search, click Install Now, then Activate. Four categories cover a normal site: an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, a backup plugin if your host only does weekly backups, and a security plugin.

Restraint here pays for itself later. Patchstack's 2026 security report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem during 2025, and 91% of them were in plugins — against six in WordPress core, all low priority. Every plugin you add is a piece of somebody else's code with permission to run on your site. Before installing anything, check when it was last updated, how many active installs it has, and whether it reports as compatible with your WordPress version.

Phase 8 — Publish

Preview on a phone before you press the button, because that is where most of your visitors will be and the desktop editor flatters everything. Check that your menu works, that the contact form actually sends, and that the search-engine setting from phase four is still unchecked. Then publish. A site with four honest pages that exists beats a perfect one that does not.

Phase 9 — Start the maintenance rhythm immediately

Do not treat this as a later problem. Core security and minor releases apply themselves; major versions are deliberate, and there are about three a year. Plugin updates are the actual workload, and you have two options. Turn on per-plugin auto-updates at Plugins → Installed Plugins, using the "Enable auto-updates" link in the rightmost column — that trades a small risk of a broken layout for a much smaller window of exposure. Or update manually every fortnight using the "Update Available" filter and Bulk Actions, checking the site afterwards. Back up before you update either way; WordPress's own documentation says so for good reason.

Our estimate for a small site on managed hosting with auto-updates on is fifteen to thirty minutes a month; doing it manually with staging checks is more like one to two hours. That is the ongoing cost that does not appear on any invoice, and it is the main reason a hosted platform beats WordPress for some owners — a trade our WordPress vs website builders comparison prices out in full. If nobody is going to do these thirty minutes, that is worth knowing in week one rather than week fifty.