How to Teach WordPress in 2023
If you’re teaching WordPress, using the right resources is critical. In this tutorial, we’ll present Toolset’s courses for WordPress and talk about a number of other courses that we like.
What your students should know when learning WordPress
The purpose of learning WordPress is for your students to be able to build sites. What students need to learn depends on the kind of sites that will build and what they want to accomplish themselves.
We’ve broken the subjects into basic, intermediate and advanced skills. Of course, there’s no point in jumping to advanced topics before students cover the basics.
Basic WordPress skills
Once students learn basic WordPress skills, they should be able to build a site themselves, make it look decent and launch it. We think that basic WordPress skills include:
- Understanding what are domains and hosting
- Basic site settings
- Choosing and installing a theme
- How to use posts and pages
- Editing content (using text, images and videos)
- Setting a homepage and/or blog
- Working with comments
- Creating menus
With these very basic skills, your students can build what we call “brochure sites”. These are simple sites that act like a fancy business card. The sites that students will build with these skills already look fine, but they should still be “practice sites” and not something to sell and deliver to others.
Intermediate WordPress skills
Once your students know how to build nice brochure sites, it’s time to move on and learn how to build more advanced sites.
Intermediate topics should include:
- What plugins are, how to find and install them
- Setting up additional users with the right roles
- Using more design blocks
- Using WordPress block patterns
- Backup
- Performance and caching
- A bit on SEO
- Updates and security
This list is not comprehensive and different teachers will surely have their own ideas about which topics to include. While these topics don’t yet expand on the kinds of sites that students can build, they allow students to build much more professional sites, which they can deliver to clients.
Advanced WordPress skills
When you talk about advanced WordPress skills, the sky is the limit. We picked subjects that are general enough to be useful for many advanced sites.
Once students reach this point, they have a solid foundation and can learn by themselves how to build any kind of advanced site, with any mix of features.
Toolset offers complete courses on:
- WordPress Directory and Classifieds Sites
- WordPress Real Estate Sites
- WordPress Membership Sites
- Custom WooCommerce Sites
- Custom Business Sites
- WordPress Design Course
What to Focus on When Teaching WordPress in 2023
In 2023, new web technologies emerge every day. Easier editing and full-site customization have transformed, improved, and revolutionized WordPress:
- Websites are becoming dynamic and complex – today, websites are no longer a static “brochure”, detailing what a business offers. Instead, websites allow visitors and clients to fully interact with businesses.
- The time to build websites is shrinking – many clients are rushing to have a great online presence and they need it right now.
- Efficiency is king – there’s a lot of demand, but also a lot of competition. WordPress builders who use great tools and work efficiently have a huge advantage.
- WordPress itself is now “Gutenberg friendly” – the block content editor in WordPress, called Gutenberg, is now the standard. People going into WordPress development should be completely fluent in this editor.
The topics that we recommended will help students focus on “what matters today”, preparing them for successful careers in website building.
Educational Licenses and Discounts
Toolset team works with educators in colleges, adult schools and training programs. We can help you with complementary accounts for yourself, with free online tools for your students and with discounts for graduates. Contact us if you’re interested.
This is very helpful to me as someone who is just starting to learn WordPress. Thanks very much!
Just thought I’d ask what the timeline is for php 8? We tested it and noticed some issues.