Does WordPress require coding?

Does WordPress require coding? No, coding required, but.

WordPress does not require any coding from the website owner or user. Does knowing coding help when dealing and working with WordPress? Sure. 

WordPress is open source. Meaning it was created by a community to be used for free by its users. WordPress has been around almost as long as the modern internet. 

Around 30% of all websites on the internet today are WordPress websites. WordPress websites are owned and run by a variety of people from all walks of life with a wide range of interests. 

You have developers and software engineers who have their own WordPress sites as well as data scientists. 

You also have mommy bloggers and recipes sites with WordPress websites as well as car enthusiasts. There are WordPress websites by people who just like to work out in their garden and share their gardening tips to the world. 

In fact, all these WordPress websites provide and share valuable information to people all over the world. 

WordPress websites are probably in every country on the planet, written in a variety of languages.

Surely not all of these WordPress owned websites are run by professional coders or even people who know how to code at all. 

That’s the beauty of WordPress and why it’s the most popular content management system (CMS) on the internet today. 

However, if you do know some coding, it may make your life a little easier in dealing with some WordPress issues in design and functionality. 

Although WordPress is basically built on the coding language of PHP and uses JavaScript, you as the individual WordPress website owner do not need to know these coding languages. They are not required to set up and run a WordPress website. 

WordPress also uses HTML and CSS coding throughout the website. These two types of coding ‘languages” would be very useful for you to learn. 

The beauty of using HTML and CSS is that you can change a lot of the design and functionality of, not only your WordPress posts and pages, but even working with the site design itself. 

If you want to make something bold, change a color, a size, etc. using these two coding languages can help you immensely. And they’re really easy to learn. 

There’s plenty of online courses and tutorials on how to accomplish a lot of great things with your WordPress site just knowing HTML and CSS. 

Here is a link to a very useful site that an absolute beginner can begin learning about these two very valuable coding languages that can help them mentally with their WordPress sites: W3Schools.com. 

Although even though WordPress is built on PHP and uses JavaScript throughout, 

it’s not advised for any novice user to actually go into your WordPress website’s theme and start fiddling around with the PHP code or the JavaScript. 

You can do a lot more harm than good. And it’s not needed. In fact, it is not recommended at all that you mess around with the PHP in your WordPress website. 

That’s why it’s very important for you when getting a WordPress website that you look at your theme really carefully. Not only the design and the colors or even the functionality of your theme. 

Although those are definitely important factors to consider when choosing a theme, but just as important, is the theme’s developer and their support. 

There are many great looking themes out there. There are also many popular themes as well, that are promoted not because they are great themes, but because of the affiliate commissions that they pay to those who promote them.

Some of these themes you may find a little too complicated to work on, even if you know code. 

Simple things like changing a header can take days on some of these well touted WordPress themes. That’s why you really need to evaluate the support of the theme’s developer. 

Personally, I can’t tell you how important support is when working with a WordPress theme, especially if you don’t know coding. 

I’ve learned so much personally from the support of my WordPress theme, GeneratePress, than any other part of the WordPress ecosystem. 

GeneratePress was my second paid theme. I bought a more expensive paid theme based on the recommendations and promotions of some of the bloggers that I followed. 

Unfortunately, when I unraveled the theme and tried to do things with it, it became a complete mess. The support was very little and delayed. I found myself spending days just trying to change a header. 

Fortunately, they are good at giving your money back. My estimation is they probably have a lot of practice of giving people’s money back on their theme. 

I’m not going to mention the theme here of course. 

However, after doing further research and determining not to make the same twice, I came across the GeneratePress. 

The theme was more than half the price of what I had paid for the first theme and it was very simple to use. 

In fact, I started with GeneratePress’s free theme. I liked it. It was clean and easy to work with, even for a beginner’s level WordPress user like myself. 

But when I saw how much the premium version cost and not only all the features they included, but regular updates and access to the support forum itself, I was sold. 

Actually, the developer who created the theme to begin with, Tom Usborne, is quite active in his own forum. 

There are not many WordPress developers who are actually involved in the support of their own themes.

Usually support for some of the most popular themes are hired out and outsourced to call centers. 

I’ve learned so much just participating in the support forums of GeneratePress, that it has really helped my WordPress skills immensely. 

The beauty of it all is, it doesn’t require me to know any PHP or WordPress coding at all. If I do need any type of coding help, they’ve usually walked me through it. How’s that for support!

Can I use WordPress to practice coding?

It depends on what kind of coding you want to practice on WordPress. 

For example, if you want to practice your HTML and CSS skills, try out some different tricks to see if you can really decorate a page using nothing but code, then a WordPress website is a great place to do it. 

You can see the changes you make in real-time online by just refreshing the page. Also in the editor where you put your content, there are usually two tabs at the top. One tab for text and one for visual. 

The visual tab is how people will see the post or page in plain English on your website. The text tab shows the HTML code that lies beneath what people see.

It’s a good way to get to know all the symbols, coding and how they work together. So if you want to add a link, make something bolder or a different color, etc. you can see how it works in HTML and how it will look on your post or page to visitors. 

As far as other types of coding practice you may want to do on WordPress, you could be a little limited. WordPress is based on the PHP coding framework. 

So if you’re interested in learning about PHP, then a WordPress website is perfect for that kind of coding practice. 

In addition, if you want to practice JavaScript, WordPress does work with JavaScript of course as well. 

So yes, you can practice coding on your WordPress website. 

If you really want to practice tweaking a theme and trying to get it to look the way you want it, then my suggestion would be to use a free theme and to practice with that. 

You could do all kinds of coding on a free theme within the parameters of WordPress and even if you mess up, the theme is free. You could always download another theme later. 

However, I would only practice on a free website and theme. 

So you could sign up for WordPress.com for free and practice there instead of paying for a domain name and hosting etc. 

Just use WordPress.com and their free features, which should give you more than enough coding practice on a WordPress website.

Do I need to actually be able to code to edit WordPress pages?

You actually don’t need to know how to code to edit your WordPress pages or posts. You can do so within the page editor for each. 

Also, there are addons called page builders, like Elementor, the free or paid versions. WordPress now comes with their own page builder as well and it is now the default editor in WordPress. It’s called Gutenberg. It’s structured like a page builder using a series of blocks. 

These blocks are basically codes that are premade, which can add certain functionalities and looks to each WordPress post or page like: tables, columns, special boxes and fonts etc. 

In fact, WordPress development is evolving to the point where a person needs to know less and less coding in order to operate and do more and more with a WordPress site. Especially, since the advent of page builders. 

But in my opinion, page builders are only the beginning. Pretty soon you may even be able to build your own WordPress theme using a series of codes that will be chunked and prepackaged in blocks, similar to a page builder. Only they will be site builders for WordPress in particular.

Can I build a WordPress site without coding?

Of course, you can build a WordPress site without coding. In fact, WordPress was designed for people with no coding experience.

What coding does WordPress use?

The WordPress platform is built on a language called PHP. This is the main framework and building block for all WordPress themes. 

WordPress also uses JavaScript, HTML and CSS code as well.

How long does it take to learn WordPress?

Everyone has their own learning curve. In fact, I would go as far as saying that you never truly learn WordPress, because WordPress is always evolving and there will always be something that you’ll want to learn or add to your website. 

So consider learning WordPress more as a process and not a destination. 

However, to get a basic website up and running on the internet, you could probably learn enough WordPress in a day to actually get a functioning website, even if you have no coding experience. 

If you want to do it step by step, then probably take a few days or even a week. It depends on how much time you have to dedicate to learning enough WordPress to get a website up and running the way you want it.

What is the best way to learn WordPress?

The best way to learn WordPress is to simply get your hands dirty and get in there and learn it by building a website with it. 

The best way to learn for free would be to open an account with WordPress.com and set up a free domain and hosting with them. It could be about anything, but the purpose should be to learn WordPress. 

Afterwards, if you like it and you feel comfortable enough to have a real website on a topic that you want to talk about, then you should actually buy a hosting package with one of the WordPress hosting providers and either download a free WordPress theme or pay for a WordPress theme.

I would highly recommend the latter since paid WordPress themes come with so much more than the free versions. 

Plus you’ll have free updates and support from the theme’s developers. You can get a really great looking theme for under $100 these days. 

That theme may require a yearly subscription, where it includes all the updates, access to forums, any new child themes or functionality that the developer adds etc. 

For example I pay about $39 a year for my GeneratePress subscription and it’s worth it. With GeneratePress I can put their theme and everything included on unlimited websites as well. 

Some themes only allow you a limited amount of websites that you could use it on or their yearly subscription fees are higher, etc. Some WordPress themes have a one time, lifetime fee with no renewals. 

You really have to shop around, look at recommendations on forums etc.

Is Wix easier than WordPress?

Platforms like Wix and SquareSpace in general, I must admit, are easier than WordPress. 

I am an avid WordPress user and fan, but even I must admit that those other platforms are easier, especially for beginners. 

They are one step up from having a Facebook business page, but Wix or SquareSpace or don’t give you that much more freedom or control than a Facebook business page. 

With Wix you are stuck with their servers and hosting as well as their themes and support. The only thing you own within your Wix website is the domain name itself. 

If you decide for example that you want to try WordPress or want a better service provider or theme provider with better support, more control over your website and you are already on Wix, you are going to have to almost start from scratch if you were to move. 

Of course you could take your own content with you, whether that’s text, images, video, links etc. 

But you’re going to have to literally copy and paste them into some kind of word or text document and then buy a new theme, get new hosting, upload all your content that way. It can be real paying the neck to do so. 

However, if you just want to hang a shingle on the internet and don’t want to mess around too much with a website and things like hosting and themes etc. then Wix will probably be your best bet.

Does WordPress require coding? Conclusions.

There you have it. WordPress does not require coding in order to have a WordPress website. 

In fact, WordPress is evolving to the point where one day you may even be able to literally build your own theme from scratch, using blocks of code similar to what page builders are doing nowadays with WordPress posts and pages. 

There are of course website builders out there that you can buy. But buying a WordPress theme is much easier than dealing with a lot of these DIY website builder packages. 

Even though WordPress does not require any coding knowledge, the more coding you know, the easier your life might be on WordPress. 

But go ahead anyway and start your WordPress website today, no coding required.