How to Write and Add a Post in WordPress

When you have a WordPress website, creating a new post is a must regardless of your kind of website. This is one of the most basic and important steps for every WordPress user. In this article, we will give you detailed and careful guidance on how to do it with the two kinds of the editor: the Classic editor and the new Gutenberg editor.

But first, someone may be confused about what is the difference between two kinds of these editors.

The Classic editor, as described by name, is the classic version of WordPress editor from the beginning. It has old-style fields and a simple interface.

This editor seems to fit with a simple website or a website with few images.

Gutenberg editor was announced to WordPress users in 2017. It’s built based on the “moveable” blocks, which can be anything from text, blockquote, social media embed, video, audio, …

It has the ability to show what your post looks like in the front end. Moreover, you can create and custom Gutenberg block using plugins or code. So, now you have more choices to work with than the Classic editor. Especially, it’s more ideal for a media-based website.

The new Gutenberg editor has become a new trend and it is considered the revolution and future of WordPress editor. Now, all the site of WordPress 5.0 uses this new editor as default. You can disable the Gutenberg editor and come back to the Classic editor if you haven’t got used to this new editor and still prefer the Classic editor. But we think that it’s better for you to know how to use both of them.

1. Add a Post Using the Classic Editor

Step 1: Open a New Post Editor

To open a new Post Editor, there are two main ways. The first way is that on the admin bar, click Add New > Post.

Or go to the Dashboard > Post > Add New.

Step 2: Write Content and Add Media

This is the Post Editor where you work. There are the main parts you absolutely should know.

1: Post Title - Add a title for your post. It should be informative and not too long.

2: Writing Area - The largest blank space where you can write, paste texts or media items.

3: Editing Tools - Standard tools to format your text like Bold, Italic, Centralize, …

4: Visual Tab - Staying in the visual tab is easier to view text and edit posts. The Text Tab is used for writing HTML.

5: Add Media - Click here to add the media for your post.

Besides, it has a sidebar on the right for some purposes that I will mention in Step 3 and a Screen Options. Click this Screen Options and you will see many options to tick/untick. They are used to enable or disable some elements of your post.

Format Content

In the Visual tab, the text and media display normally so normal users often use it to easily write and edit content. But even when you aren’t a coder, it still needs you to work with the Text tab if you want your content to display what you want to the high degree of accuracy, like edit link, heading, image size, …

To format content, you definitely need to work with Editing Tools. For the basic functions, it’s not difficult to use at all as they’re quite similar to other editors like Google Doc, Microsoft Word Office. But if you pay attention to SEO optimization, you should deal with the Heading, Hyperlink and Text Styling more frequently. They not only help you arrange and emphasize the important parts but also let the searching machine find the keyword of your content easily, leading to SEO improvement.

Insert link to your post is important when you build backlink for better website ranking or let your reader refer to another post. Instead of showing the whole long link, you can use hyperlink, which makes your post look much better and professional. First, choose texts that you want to hyperlink (we call these texts “anchor texts”), click this icon on the Editing Tools Bar, then insert a link, press Enter or this button.

After that, you can even edit or remove the link. This bar will appear when you click the anchor text.

Add Media

There are many kinds of media you can add to your post: image, file, gallery, audio, video, audio list, video list.

Step 1: Upload New Media

When you click the Add Media button, a new frame will appear like this.

The Media Library area here contains all of your available items. If you want to upload new items from your computer. Click Upload Files.

Then Select Files or drop one from your computer.

Step 2: Add Information for Your Media

Alternative texts are used to describe the image or media item within an HTML code. They are important as they can help improve your SEO ranking. Click an item and look at the sidebar on the right. Here you can write alternative texts, edit image title and caption for this single media item.

Step 3: Insert Media to Your Post

Your uploaded files are saved in the Media Library. Now you can choose one media item in this library by clicking on it. The blue tick icon appearing on the right corner of this item means it’s chosen. To find your desired media quickly, pay attention to the Search Bar and Filter Media.

In case you don’t want to select this item, you can unselect and select others. By hovering the mouse to the Tick, you will see it turn to a Dash, then just click it to cancel the selection. Or simply, you just need to click Clear on the bottom of this frame.

After choosing, click Insert Into Post to add it to your Writing Area.

So, what if you want to insert multiple media items on your post? It’s totally possible. The list of Actions on the left of the frame will let you do that. You can create a list of videos, audios or a gallery easily.

If you want to add an image gallery, you can refer to this article to know how to do it. Similarly, you can apply these steps to Create Audio Playlist or Create Video Playlist.

Finally, if you don’t want to use any media item, you can delete it by clicking to this item and choosing Remove (the X button).

Embed URL

Sometimes, your website has to store too much data so your server becomes overloaded due to a large number of uploaded media. To resolve this problem, it’s highly recommended that you use an embedded URL. With this method, your media items still display normally as you upload and insert them to the post, but your website now is much more lightweight.

In the Classic editor, you are allowed to insert any media from URL like a video from Youtube, Vimeo, or an image from Imgur, … Just follow these steps: Click Insert from URL, insert a link on this tab, click Insert into Post.

Let me tell me another much easier way to embed a link: just paste the link directly to the post. The media will be displayed immediately.

Step 3: Ready to Publish the Post

Set Featured Image

A featured image - the image represents for your post - is a necessary part of a post. Especially, on an archive page, this image helps your page and post more beautiful and attractive like this:

To set up it, there are 2 ways. But initially, you have to open Screen Options and tick to the Featured Image to enable this section.

Now we will move to the details. The first way is going to Add Media > Featured Image, select an image, and finally, click the Set Featured Image button.

Or simply, look at the sidebar on the right, click Set Featured Image and select one image from the library or delete it by Remove Featured Image button.

Post Excerpt and Permanent Link

Don’t forget some minor but important step before you publish: displaying post excerpt, editing the permanent link.

After you write the Post Title and Post Content, a Permanent Link will appear right after the title track. You can edit it by clicking the Edit button. A permanent URL is very essential since it helps your readers to find your post at that particular URL easier.

As for the excerpt, it’s important to give your readers a quick look at the brief content of your post. You are able to create a manual excerpt but it depends on the theme you are using. Maybe it doesn’t display a manual excerpt or post excerpt in general.

Preview and Publish

After finishing editing the content, we will show you the final step to publish it. Look at the sidebar on the right, make sure that you completely set up your post.

1: Save Draft - This button will help you save your post. I’m sure that you don’t want to cry a lot if anything happens to delete your data. So, you should often click it to make sure that your writing process is saved.

2: Format - Choose the format for your post based on your purpose and one of these formats will be your featured image. For example, for a normal article, you should select Image, but a single video post should be marked as Video format. The list of Format varies depending on the theme you use and remember that not every theme support Format.

3: Category - Select a category for your post. It makes your archive more well-organized and people can find a needed post based on the category easily. But you have to already have categories before.

4: Preview - Click it to see how your post is before publishing to make sure that it can display on the front end properly as you want and only admin can see this.

5: Publish - Click it to publish your post.

However, sometimes you don’t want to publish your post immediately because it’s not the right time to reach your readers. If so, the schedule function will help you manage the time and workload conveniently. Follow these steps and fill in the date and time you want to post, then click Schedule, your article will be published at the right time you choose.

Once you publish, you can come back to the Post Editor to reedit your post. Click Preview Changes to see the changes and then click Update to save the updated article.

2. Add a Post Using the New Gutenberg Editor.

It’s similar to open a new post editor of the Classic editor. But different from the Classic editor, you have to add a block for a paragraph, quotation, heading, table, media items (video, audio, file, image, gallery) or embedded links.

1: Add Title - Add your post title here
2: Click this “+” to choose the kind of block you use.
3: Click this “+” to add another block.

Step 1: Add and Format a Block

All you need is clicking this “+” icon, and then a drop-down menu will show you a list of blocks. To have a quick search, you can use the search bar. Then, look at the left side, this area shows you the chosen block and the options to set up it. Please note that this area has different options for different blocks.

To insert another block after the previous block, just click the “+” icon at the top of the frame and choose a block in the list.

There is another simpler way to add a new block or break the current block into two. Just point the cursor to the place where you want to add a new one under it and press Enter.

Additionally, there are many actions you can do with the chosen block. When clicking the block, you will see a toolbar to format it. For more things like duplicate, delete, insert a block, … use this button and these actions can help you do it faster. Besides, you can move it up or down quickly between the other blocks by these arrows, so flexible, right?

Format Content

First, add a Paragraph block and write your content here. Next, you are able to format your content using the editing toolbar and the sidebar options. The common format like choosing the bold, italic style, and hyperlink is quite similar to the Classic Editor. But now you can color the texts and background using the sidebar options. They will make your post more colorful and creative.

However, it’s not similar to the Classic Editor in terms of heading, list, and quotation because they are separate blocks. Thus, you have to choose a Heading, List, Quotation blocks and write the content. Or you can switch the current paragraph block to one of the relevant formats allowed here by clicking this button and choose one from the list.

Add Media

Media items can be inserted by selecting an equivalent block. We will take an image block for example, and it’s similar to add a video block, audio block.

We select and insert an image block, and in this block frame, you will see the three main buttons (this frame is similar to other media blocks). Here you can Upload Media from your device, Select files from Media Library or Embed a URL (we will mention how to embed a URL more specifically in the next part below).

This is how you upload and select an image (or any media item with the equivalent block) from your computer. Unlike the Classic editor, that image will be inserted immediately to the post after you upload it.

And this is how you select an available image (or any media item with the equivalent block) from your WordPress library.

How about creating a gallery? This article will help you do it right away.

With Gutenberg, you just need to choose a media block you want and stay in this block frame to do all the action instead of multiple steps in the Classic editor. Plus, writing a caption and alternative text for media items is easier as well as setting up the image size in a more exact way. They can be seen clearly and edited easily with this new interface.

Embed an URL

Embedding a URL is now easier. All you need to do is selecting the Video, Image, or Audio block to embed a link. And in this frame, choose Insert from URL > Insert a URL > Enter or click this button.

Moreover, it supports embedding links from specific popular video channels, audio channels, images, and even social networking sites. Go to Embed part in the list of the blocks and you will be surprised. For instance, we embedded a video from YouTube within a blink of an eye here. You can view how it looks right after embedding the link in the tab.

Step 2: Before Publishing Post

Look at the Document tab in the sidebar and you will see all the sections to set up your whole post.

Just like the Classic editor, you should select the Category, Adding Tag (to help people quickly find needed post by keyword), editing Permanent Link, choose a Format here.

It’s time to add a featured image to make your post more prominent and professional. In this tab, click Featured Image and now you can choose, replace or remove a featured image.

Under the featured image section, write your manual excerpt in this blank box. Like I mentioned before, not all themes display this section.

Step 3: Preview and Publish the Post

Finally, in the image below, you will see the annotated area with three buttons: Save Draft, Preview and Publish. As described by name, you just need to click to them to respectively save your writing, to preview the post and to officially publish it.

When you click Publish, another tab appears to remind you to double-check your post. Make sure that everything is ready to be posted, and click Publish.

To schedule your post published date, click the date and time next to Publish and you will see a frame appear. Just choose the date and time in the calendar or fill in the boxes here. Finally, click Schedule to complete scheduling your post.

Now you have a quick knowledge about creating and editing a post on WordPress with the two kinds of the editor. It’s not difficult at all, especially if you spend time exploring it, right?

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