Your website has two sides. The public side is what everyone sees. The private side, called the dashboard, is where you make changes — and only people with accounts can get in.
Logging in
Go to your site’s web address and add /wp-admin to the end. Sign in with your university username and password. You will land on the dashboard: a plain administrative screen with a menu down the left side. Visitors never see any of this.
A tour of the dashboard
The left-side menu has more options than you will ever need. Only a few matter:
- Pages — the permanent pages of your site: your homepage, your research page, your contact page, and so on.
- Posts — dated news items. The difference between pages and posts matters, and it gets its own explanation.
- Media — every image you have ever uploaded, kept in one library you can reuse.
- Appearance — controls how the site looks. See themes.
- Users — who can log in. See users.
Everything else in the menu you can safely ignore.
Making your first edit
Click Pages, find the page you want to change, and click its title. The editor opens, showing the page much as visitors see it.
Everything on a page is a block — a paragraph is a block, a heading is a block, an image is a block. Click into any paragraph and start typing. To add something new, click the plus sign and pick what you want. You can drag blocks up and down to rearrange them.
Nothing you do is visible to the public until you click the Update button (or Publish, for a page that has never been published). Until then, fiddle freely. The Preview option shows you exactly how the page will look before you commit.
You cannot really break it
Every time you update a page, WordPress quietly keeps the old version — you can open a page’s revision history and restore any earlier state. On top of that, we keep backups of your entire site. There is no combination of clicks that puts you somewhere we cannot get you back from.
So experiment. The fastest way to learn the editor is to open a draft page and mess with it until it stops being mysterious.