You have hired someone to look after the website’s content: new blog posts, an updated price list, this month’s offer on the home page. They are good at writing and know the business, but they have never logged in to WordPress. And the last time a colleague “just changed one word”, the page layout fell apart and nobody knew how to undo it.
WordPress training for staff does not need to be a course. It needs to be short, specific to your own site, and built around the handful of jobs each person will actually do. This post sets out a plan you can run yourself in a few sessions, including what to leave out, which matters as much as what you put in.
Decide who needs to do what, before anyone logs in
When you set out to teach your team to update WordPress, the biggest mistake is teaching everyone everything. Most staff need two or three tasks, done well. Write them down person by person.
| Person | Typical tasks | WordPress role that fits |
|---|---|---|
| Content writer | Write and publish blog posts, add images | Author, or Editor if they also edit others’ posts |
| Office manager | Update opening hours, the team page, the price list | Editor |
| Intern or new starter | Draft posts for someone else to check | Contributor |
| Person packing orders on a shop | Process orders, update stock | Shop Manager, if you use WooCommerce |
| Owner | Approve, and keep the keys | Administrator, ideally a separate account used rarely |
Roles control what each login can do, so a contributor cannot publish by accident and an editor cannot install plugins. Our guide to giving each WordPress user only what they need explains the roles in detail. Give each person their own login, never a shared one; when someone leaves, you remove one account instead of changing a password everyone knows.
Prepare three things before the first session
- A practice page. Create a private or draft page called “Practice” where people can try anything without it going live. A staging copy of the site is even better if your host offers one.
- A list of your site’s own building blocks. Every theme and page builder works slightly differently. Note which editor your site uses, whether it is the standard block editor or a page builder such as Elementor, and which pages are built in which. Staff need to learn your site, not WordPress in general.
- A written cheat sheet, started now and finished during training. More on that below.
Session one: pages and posts
Keep it to one subject and about an hour. Work on the practice page, with the trainee’s hands on the keyboard and yours off it.
- The difference between a page and a post. Pages are the permanent parts of the site, such as About and Services. Posts are dated entries that appear in the blog. Staff often create a page when they meant a post, and then wonder why it is not in the blog list.
- Adding and moving blocks. In the block editor, everything is a block: a paragraph, a heading, an image, a button. Typing a forward slash on an empty line brings up a quick block search. The List View button shows every block on the page, which makes it far easier to find and move things.
- Headings in order. Use headings for structure, not to make text bigger. One main section heading, then smaller ones beneath it.
- Save draft, Preview, Publish. Practise all three. Then practise scheduling a post for tomorrow.
- Revisions. WordPress keeps earlier versions of posts and pages. Show where to find them in the editor’s sidebar and how to restore one. Knowing this one thing takes away much of the fear of breaking something.
Session two: images and files
Images cause a lot of trouble on staff-edited sites, mostly because of file size.
- Resize before uploading. A photo straight from a phone is far larger than any web page needs. Show staff how to resize and compress on their own computer, or with a free tool, before the image goes anywhere near the Media Library.
- Name files sensibly.
diwali-offer-banner.jpgrather thanIMG_4382.jpg. It makes the Media Library searchable a year from now. - Alt text. A short description of the image, for people using screen readers and for search engines. Teach them to describe what is in the picture, not to stuff in keywords.
- PDFs and documents. Uploading a new version of a price list creates a new file with a new address. Old links still point to the old one. Decide who updates the links.
Our post on optimising images for a website is a good handout for this session.
Session three: the things that break, and what to do
This session is less about doing and more about knowing when to stop. Cover:
- Menus. Where they live (Appearance > Menus, or the Site Editor on block themes) and how a new page gets added to one. New pages do not appear in the menu by themselves on most sites.
- Forms. Which plugin runs the contact form, and that changing its fields can stop enquiries reaching you. Most staff should not edit form settings at all.
- Anything that says “Update”. Staff will see update notices. Make it a firm rule that they ignore them and leave updates to whoever looks after the site.
- The signal to stop. If a page suddenly looks wrong, stop editing, do not keep clicking, and tell someone. Restoring a revision fixes most content mistakes. Continuing to edit on top of a problem makes it harder to undo.
What to leave out of WordPress training for staff
Some parts of WordPress are not content work, and teaching them invites changes nobody planned:
- Installing, updating or deactivating plugins.
- Theme settings, the Customizer and global styles.
- Settings screens, especially Permalinks and Reading.
- User management, apart from changing their own password.
- Anything in the hosting control panel.
Leaving these out is easier when roles are set correctly, because an Editor or Author simply does not see most of them. The tasks an owner can reasonably take on themselves, without a developer, are covered in our post on website maintenance you can do yourself; staff training sits one level below that.
The one-page cheat sheet
A written page beats any amount of remembered training. Keep it short enough to print. A good one includes:
- The login address and who to ask for a password reset.
- Which editor each important page uses.
- Image size rules, written as plain instructions.
- The steps for the three most common tasks, in your site’s own terms.
- How to restore a revision.
- What staff must never touch.
- Who to contact when something looks wrong, and what to include in the message.
Update the cheat sheet whenever the site changes. A sheet describing last year’s layout is worse than none.
Recording the sessions
If you train over a video call, record it with everyone’s agreement. Short recordings of a single task, such as “adding a team member to the team page”, are far more useful later than one long session. Store them where new staff can find them, with the cheat sheet.
Where staff editing ends and support begins
Good training draws a clear line: staff change content, and someone else handles the software underneath. It helps to agree in writing which content changes your staff will make and which go to your developer or maintenance provider; our post on what counts as a website content update helps with that conversation. When staff hit a problem outside their tasks, they should know exactly who provides wordpress support for the site, whether that is a colleague, a freelancer or an outside team.
When someone leaves, or someone new joins
Staff turnover is where site knowledge quietly disappears. The person who knew that the offers banner lives in a widget, not on the home page, leaves, and their replacement spends a morning hunting for it. Two habits prevent this:
- Hand over in the site, not in a meeting. Before the leaving person’s last week, have them do each of their tasks once while the new person watches, then swap. Add anything new they mention to the cheat sheet.
- Close the old account the same day. Delete or downgrade their login, and when WordPress asks what to do with their content, assign it to another user rather than deleting it. Check they did not have access to the hosting account or any plugin dashboards too.
A new starter then needs only the three sessions above, in the same order, using the same practice page. That repeatability is the main payoff of writing the plan down once.
Checking the training worked
A month after the last session, ask each person to do their main task while you watch, without the cheat sheet. Note where they hesitate. Those are the points to add to the sheet or to cover again in a short follow-up. Look too at what they have published: image sizes, headings, alt text. Small habits slip quickly, and a ten-minute review catches them early.
If you would rather your team handled the words and pictures while updates, backups and fixes stayed with someone else, our monthly WordPress care plan page explains what that covers.
For a written reference your team can come back to, our guide to managing a WordPress website covers each everyday task step by step.
