If you chose to have a blog, we will have created a blog template for you when we built your website. This template will be designed just for you, and it’ll be created to match the design of your website.
Although you could edit each of your blog posts using Elementor (like we do for pages), it would potentially cause some issues down the road, so we do not recommend using Elementor for editing your posts or creating new ones. Your template can be changed at a later date, and those changes will populate globally, meaning the appearance of all existing posts will change to match the new template. Because of this, you’ll want to use WordPress’ default editing mode to create your posts. This is the easiest way to create new posts (the template will style them for you), and it ensures that future changes to the appearance of your blog are as easy as possible.
How to create a new post or edit an existing post
By clicking on the Posts tab on the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll be taken to an area with all your existing posts. There will also be an Add New button at the top next to Posts; this is what you will click to create a new blog post.
Once you open a post, either by clicking on the post name (or by hovering over the post and then clicking on Edit) or by adding a new post, you will find a text editor page that functions a lot like Google Docs or Microsoft Word.
🚨 Caution: There may be a button at the top of the page that says Edit with Elementor. Do not click this button; rather, use the WordPress editor so posts are easily changed with our template process described above.
Using the post editor
The post editor will allow you to format the text in your post and organize it the way you want. You aren’t designing the post as much as you are preparing the text for the design of your template.
Post title
At the top of your editor, you’ll have the title of the post. Most likely, this will be formatted in your template to appear at the top of your post. You can name your posts whatever you’d like.
Headings
Using headings to organize the content in your posts is a great way to make them more readable and easy to digest. These headings will appear in the editor as they would in a Google Doc or Word document, but they’ll be formatted in accordance with your template when you post it.
To make something a heading, type the text you want, and then highlight it. There will be a toolbar that will appear over your text. Click on the formatting icon on the far left and then select Heading. You’ll have a series of heading styles to choose from, and they’ll appear in the toolbar as H1, H2, H3, and so on. Select the one you want for your heading.
Best practice is to think of your headings like you would think of headings in a textbook: H1 might define a big idea, and then you may use multiple H2 to break that idea down further. You may even want to use H3, H4, etc. if you are really diving deeply into an idea. Headings are meant to help your reader organize the information you are giving them, so use them in the way that makes the most sense for your context.
Formatting text
Using the toolbar that appears above your text, you can also switch text styles: italics, bold, etc. (these appear as a bolded B, an italicized I, or you can click on the drop-down button to see more options).
You can also highlight text and make that text a hyperlink to another webpage. You do this by clicking on the link icon (it looks kind of like a hyphen inside parentheses). Many people will do this by saying something like “You can see more by clicking here” and making “clicking here” a hyperlink to the page they’d like people to be able to consult.
Adding other elements
A plus icon should appear at the bottom-right side of your text. Click on this to add other elements to your post, such as lists, images, and quotes.
You can also add a heading via this menu if you would rather do that than edit existing text as outlined above.
To add an image, you’ll click on Image and then select Media Library to add an optimized image to your post.
Moving sections
You can move whole sections by using the second icon from the left in the toolbar (it looks like two columns of three dots). Click and hold this icon to select the entire section of text; then you can move it to anywhere in the post that you want.
Post settings
There is a sidebar to the right of the text editing space where there are some items you’ll want to pay attention to.
Note: When you are active in the text editor, that sidebar will switch to the Block tab, giving you styling options for the block of text you have selected. You typically won’t need to use any of these. Click on the Post tab to see the settings for the whole post.
Summary
The summary of the post will include:
- The visibility of the post
- The publish date
- The template used to create the post
- The URL for the post
- The post’s author
Categories
Categories can be used to organize the posts on your blog by their topics. If you are using this feature, you’ll have a list of categories, and you can simply select the appropriate category for your post.
Tags
We don’t generally suggest using tags for your posts unless you have a very complex site.
Featured image
We recommend always setting a featured image for every single post. Here’s why:
If your blog template uses a hero image either across from the title or behind the title, this section defines what gets used in that space. This image is either going to be a full-width image (meaning that it will span the whole window when someone is looking at a blog post on your site) or a primary image associated with your post. It’s also what will be shown if someone shares your post via social media or messaging services.
Excerpt
This defines the text that is previewed, so if you want to control what text shows up when a post is shared, you can do so here.
Discussion
If you have comments enabled on your blog, you can still turn off comments on a single post by deselecting the box that says Allow comments. A lot of blogs will have comments disabled or they will use another commercial comment service, but if you have the default WordPress comments enabled, you’ll be able to control them here.
Search Exclude
For the most part, it’s not in your best interest to exclude a blog post from your website’s search feature since that will make it harder for people to find it. But if you wanted to do this for any reason, you would just click the box here that says Exclude from Search Results.
Updating or publishing a post
Updating an existing post
If you’re editing a post that is already published on your blog, you want to make sure to update it once you’ve made any changes you want via the editor or the settings sidebar. To do this, simply hit Update in the upper right-hand corner. You can always open the post in another tab and refresh it to make sure that you see the changes and that they’ve appeared the way you intended.
Publishing a new post
If you’ve created a new post by clicking the Add New button back in the main Posts area, it won’t be live on your blog until you click the Publish button in the upper right-hand corner (this button will be where the Update button is for existing posts).
You can also click Save draft if you are still working on the post and want to save your progress but not publish yet, or you can use the Preview button to see what the post will look like when it’s styled according to your template.
Changing the SEO settings
Below the text of your post in the editor, you’ll see a space where you can change your SEO settings for your post. You’ll be able to override what shows up for Google or social media, such as the title, meta description, or images.
There is also an option to utilize WordPress’ content analysis to add keywords and see what improvements you could make to your content to help it rank better in Google searches.
Both of these things are optional, but they’re here if you’d like to experiment with them.
Note: We’ll go into more detail about using the SEO features on WordPress in a later part.