Is WordPress hard to use? Not as hard as you think.

Is WordPress really that hard to use?

WordPress isn’t hard to use, but it does have a learning curve. Whether it’s a piece of software, CMS or any other bit of Tech, like your cell phone or your cable TV box with 500 channels? Everything has a learning curve. 

However, WordPress’s learning curve is not as steep or as hard as you may think it is. 

In fact, I’ve been using WordPress for over 10 years and I can proudly say that I don’t know a lick of PHP. This is the programming language (PHP) that WordPress is built upon. 

Ten years ago it took me about 3 or 4 hours to wrap my head around the whole “getting a website up on the internet and live lesson”. I had heard a lot about WordPress, so after looking at Joomla and Drupal, I knew that WordPress was for me. 

The hardest part about learning WordPress wasn’t even getting to know my themes or becoming acquainted with plugins. Nor was it how to upload them onto my WordPress dashboard. 

The difficult part for me in my learning curve of learning to use WordPress was actually pointing the name servers from the domain name registrar to my shared hosting account. 

The next difficult part was actually fiddling around with the cPanel and downloading WordPress onto my web hosting account, then doing the whole setting up usernames, passwords and all that other stuff. 

Actually, once I had WordPress uploaded correctly and my name servers were pointed at my hosting provider’s servers, I was good to go. 

In fact, I had a lot of fun poking around in my WordPress dashboard, checking out different themes, uploading them to see what they looked like. Using colors, fonts and everything else. 

When I got to plugins, I kind of went a little overboard uploading each and every plugin because I didn’t know what I needed and when I would need it. 

However, I soon discovered that having too many plugins on your WordPress website, especially ones that you don’t need or would rarely use, is not a good idea. 

But that was basically my learning curve 10 years ago. 

WordPress has evolved so much since then, that your learning curve should be much less than mine was.

In this post, I’m going to go over some of the myths that people think about WordPress and why WordPress isn’t actually too hard to use.

Do I need to know coding to use WordPress?

As I’ve mentioned above in the introduction, you do not need to know how to code in order to use WordPress. 

In fact, unless you are a WordPress developer or a PHP developer, it’s best not to mess around with your WordPress theme’s files or any of the code in them. Besides, you really don’t need to. 

However, there’s nothing stopping you from learning all about PHP, the language that powers WordPress. 

But if you’re not up for learning PHP, then brushing up on your HTML and CSS skills would be a really good idea, since they are the coding that is used to style and format your WordPress pages and posts. 

However, nowadays with the introduction of not only page builders but of WordPress’s own block editor called Gutenberg, you don’t even need to know HTML or CSS to change fonts, colors and do all kinds of nifty design tricks on your WordPress posts and pages to make them really pop. 

All of that without writing a single line of code. What do you know, a thing like that.

Is WordPress good for beginners to use?

If you’re going to start a website, you might as well do it right the first time. 

But if you’re a beginner you’re in luck, because WordPress is good for beginners to use.

Not only do you not need to know any coding whatsoever to set up your first WordPress website. You can also learn and customize your WordPress website as you go along. 

As your website grows, so will your own knowledge and skills. WordPress is the perfect platform for beginners. 

Besides, if one day you decide to sell your website, it’s much easier to sell a WordPress website than any other CMS on the internet today.

Is WordPress free?

WordPress is free. However, let’s clarify what “free” is in regards to WordPress. WordPress, the CMS or content management system, is open source and free. 

You can download hundreds, if not thousands, of free WordPress themes as well as over 50,000 WordPress plugins for free too. Although most do have paid or premium versions.

WordPress.com, however, is not free. WordPress.com is the for-profit commercial arm for the company called Automattic. 

Automattic was founded by Matt Mullenweg who was also one of the original founders of WordPress, the CMS, as well as WordPress.org, the open source free platform for WordPress users. 

However, WordPress.com offers a variety of WordPress related services including hosting as well as security and other performance tools specifically designed for WordPress. 

It must be said though, that WordPress.com does offer a free WordPress blog plan. In this free WordPress blog plan you can get a WordPress blog up and live on the internet for free. 

There are many limitations to this free blog plan from WordPress.com however, that you should become aware of if you are thinking about signing up for it.

How can I practice WordPress for free?

A great place to practice WordPress for free, in my opinion, would be to start out with a free WordPress blog on WordPress.com. 

Although as I have mentioned, there are quite a few limitations to what you can do with a free WordPress blog on WordPress.com, nonetheless, it is a great way to practice WordPress for free.

Do I need to know JavaScript for WordPress?

Although WordPress can use JavaScript in some of their themes as well as many of their plugins, it is not necessary for you to know JavaScript in order to work with WordPress. 

If you do know JavaScript however, it’s not a bad thing and can even help you customize plugins as well as some themes in WordPress.

Is Wix easier to use than WordPress?

I must say in all fairness that even though I am biased towards WordPress, this website is after all called WPWebsiteTools.com, Wix is easier to use, especially for absolute beginners, than WordPress is in the beginning. 

WordPress does have a learning curve, no doubt. But that learning curve has gotten shorter and shorter as WordPress has evolved over the years. 

The WordPress’s learning curve is certainly much shorter now and easier to grasp than it was when I started on WordPress over 10 years ago. 

However, once you learn WordPress and realize all the possibilities you have to build beautiful and well functioning websites with it. 

You’ll also realize it’s better to start out with WordPress from the beginning, even with a short learning curve, than it would be to start out with no learning curve on Wix, only to eventually get your website to the point where sooner or later, you find yourself with no other choice than to move off Wix to WordPress anyway.

The short learning curve is definitely well worth learning. I compare using Wix to learning to ride a bicycle for the first time. 

Wix is like having a bicycle with training wheels. 

The only problem is with Wix you don’t have the option of taking off those training wheels once you learn how to ride a bicycle. 

Although WordPress doesn’t have training wheels, with a little guidance you can learn to ride a bicycle without training wheels right from the start.

Can I move my website from Wix to WordPress?

Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks to using Wix, especially if you’re starting out with a Wix website instead of a WordPress website, is that you cannot move your website from Wix to WordPress. 

Although in all fairness, the opposite is also true. You can’t move a WordPress website to a Wix website.

However, one major advantage that WordPress has over Wix is that you can move your WordPress website from one web hosting provider to another. 

If your WordPress website grows and needs more resources, faster loading speeds, etc. for example, you can simply migrate it to another web hosting provider and take everything with you including your theme which you had probably worked real hard on to get it just right. With Wix you can’t. 

With Wix you are not only stuck with their themes as well as their functionality, but you’re also stuck with their platform and hosting as well as their support. 

So if you have customized your Wix website in any way, you can’t take that theme and any customizations you’ve made and migrate it to another host. Why? 

Because Wix is not an open source CMS. This means that Wix owns everything on your website, including your theme as well as any customizations you have made to it. 

The only thing you own on a Wix website is your custom domain name as well as the content and any media including images that you have on it. 

So if you were to decide to change your CMS to WordPress, you would basically need to copy and paste all your content, make copies of all your images and media and download them onto your hard drive, before copying, pasting and uploading to your new CMS whether that’s WordPress or another CMS.

What language does WordPress use?

WordPress uses the language PHP. However, WordPress also uses HTML and CSS. 

Although there are debates as to whether or not HTML and CSS are actually computer languages, nonetheless, they are used in WordPress for styling and formatting of WordPress posts and pages.

WordPress isn’t hard to use, summary.

WordPress isn’t hard to use at all. In fact, anything you want to learn or know about WordPress can be accessed through a variety of forums, courses as well as YouTube videos that you can refer to, if you have any questions or would like to learn how to perform a certain task in WordPress.

WordPress is certainly much easier to learn and use than when I first used WordPress well over 10 years ago. Even then, it only took me a few hours before I had my first WordPress website live on the internet.

Sure, there are other CMS’s available, but they are either not commonly used or they are on closed source proprietary platforms where you have little to no control over the website once you build and customize it to your liking. Good luck moving or selling a Wix site for example.

For me personally, if you are going to set up a website, it’s better to do it right the first time and set it up with WordPress. You’ll thank yourself in the long run.