A Guide To Using Your Website
Welcome to WordPress! You'll find you can edit most aspects of your website yourself, once you get familiar it is quick and easy.
If you want to jump right in, here are your quick start essentials
- Staging Site: learn how to create your Staging Site - this is a copy of your site allowing you to practice editing without affecting anything
- Page Builder Intro: watch the introductory video about how to use the Page Builder.
- Key Information Guide: we've put together key information about your website - how to change the items that you need to know most.
A Guide To Brand Styling
See the details of your Brand Style Guide here.
Check for accurate colour and font selection, and see the styling of various heading sizes throughout the site.
Key Info
To update the main areas of content on your website:
- Pages: using your website menu browse to the page you want to edit. Use the Page Builder item in the top menu to edit the page. Hover over each element on the page and click the spanner icon of each module to edit.
- Blog: add/edit blog posts and blog categories using Dashboard, Posts. Make sure to set a Featured Image
- Menus: add new items and reorder using Dashboard, Appearance, Menus
- Slides: add/edit the Slider images at the top of your website using Dashboard, Slides
- Forms: edit forms using Dashboard, Forms. Click an existing form to edit.
- Products: Edit shop products using Dashboard, Products
- Manage Orders: When orders are placed on the website for the book or classes, use Dashboard, WooCommerce, Orders to see details of who has ordered. Use the Orders page as a checklist, and tick off orders as Completed after you have shipped them.
Image Sizes
Prepare the following types of images to the required sizes before uploading to your website:
- Home Slides: 1920px x 848px
- Page Header Images: 1100 x 450px
- Gallery Images: 960px on the long side
WordPress Image Editor: Crop or resize images after uploading using Dashboard, Media Library and clicking the Edit Image link. There are videos showing how to use this editor under Dashboard, Manual, Videos.
Advanced Image Editor: Edit images before uploading using the Canva image editor.
Learn more about image optimisation: How Image Optimisation affects your website
How To Videos
Staging Site, Updates and Backups
Staging
From your WordPress dashboard, use the WPEngine, Staging item to copy your current production website across to your staging site. Get the link and login into it using your normal user id. You can make changes in Staging without affecting production. Use it as a practice ground, or if you want to make a set of changes, you can then copy the Staging site back over to Production.
You can also use Staging to try out new plugins or test updates before they are run on your Live site
Plugin Updates
Your WordPress website requires regular updates for plugins. It is recommended you know how to create backup points so you can restore your Live website to a prior backup if needed. You can also create a Staging site (a complete copy of your Live website) so you can try out new plugins or test updates before they are run on your Live site.
- Updates: Keep your website up to date - visit Dashboard, Updates regularly and make sure you are running the latest versions of WordPress, plugins and your theme.
- Backup Points: Create a backup point before running updates using Dashboard, WP Engine, User Portal (or just login to my.wpengine.com) and create a manual backup point. You can Restore to this backup point if needed.
- Test After Updates: After making changes such as updating WordPress, plugins or your theme, you should check your site still operates normally, particularly for your important website functions such as enquiry forms, online sales or service/product pages.
The process of updating theme and plugins is described in full in this article WP Engine Overview and Recommended Practices.
If you are updating the WooCommerce plugin, it is suggested that you first update all other plugins, then update WooCommerce last.
It is recommended you regularly, and definitely after upgrading your website, purchase a product from your website. Make a full payment so you can see the payment gateway working correctly, and all email notifications work correctly. You can use the test coupon code to reduce the payment amount by 99%.
Page Builder Information
Your website uses the WordPress CMS with a front-end Page Builder.
To learn more about your Page Builder:
Saved Rows and Saved Modules
These are the saved rows and modules available to reuse on your site.
- Location Tabs Row
- Service Callouts Grey Row
- Service Icon Row
- Testimonials Row
Notice some rows and/or modules are global. A global row/module also appears as a gold colour when hovered over in Page Builder. Edits to a global row/module on one page will automatically appear anywhere the row/module appears on the website. All other rows/modules are a blue colour and are standard. Edit a standard row/module and the change appears only on the page on which you're working.
Please Note: Do not delete global rows
Adding a blog post to the featured section
To add a new blog article to the featured section on your blog page:
- Click to edit the blog post
- On the right-hand side, select "Featured" as one of the categories
- Click to save the updated post
The featured section will show the 4 most recent blog posts that have the category "Featured" enabled. If your post is not showing up, it's likely that it is older than the posts that are currently featured. To fix this, head to the main posts page inside the WordPress dashboard, filter by the category "Featured" to see which posts fall into that category, then click to edit each post that you no longer want featured and unselect that category for those posts.
Analytics
If you have elected to have Google Analytics and Google Search Console configured for your website, you can review the details as follows:
- Google Analytics: Visit Google Analytics
- Google Search Console: Visit Google Search Console