3 WordPress Training Resources You Need to Know About

I can remember it like it was yesterday. Three things happened around 2009 which all culminated in me becoming deeply embedded in the WordPress ecosystem.

• I had decided that I was ready to move on from a corporate job due to burnout.
• A life coach had given me a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss which I proceeded to read three times over.
• I decided that my true passion was writing, so I was determined to find a path to location and time independence by producing website content (blogs, courses, or information products).

But I had a problem…

Although I’d built an occasional website with HTML beginning 15 years ago, I needed to spend my time and energy building an income…not coding websites.

After trying some of the major online website builders which were available at the time, I felt completely limited by what I could create and test as business concepts. There were times that I was trying to validate product ideas with a simple three or four page site with one of these services and I simply did not have the flexibility or control of the content to achieve what I wanted.

Fortunately, after enrolling in a number of courses related to online entrepreneurship and digital product creation, I realized they were all saying the same thing…

Just stick to WordPress.

Fast forward to 2022 and WordPress has become a massive part of my life. I co-founded a company to begin creating WordPress plugins, I’ve travelled around the country to attend WordPress-related conferences, and I’ve developed amazing personal relationships within the community for which I’ll be forever grateful.

However, I, like many of our WP Courseware and S3 Media Maestro users, had to start somewhere.

WordPress is a fantastic content management system to run your website on and now powers around 40% of all sites around the globe. It’s simple to change the look and feel of your site with themes, easy to extend functionality with plugins, and updating content like website pages or blog posts is simple for even non-techies.

But getting your first business or website up and running with WordPress, well, let’s just say there’s a learning curve that we’ve all had to climb.

In this article, we wanted to provide a list of some of our favorite WordPress training resources to make that learning curve more manageable.

 

WordPress Training Resource #1: LinkedIn Learning

Some of you may remember Lynda.com, which was a great resource for learning technical skills for many years. As you may or may not know, LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com a few years ago and they've rolled it into their own course marketplace now called "LinkedIn Learning".

This has been a go-to resource of mine lately for micro-learning, whether it's how to effectively use a new app or to brush up on rusty coding skills.

However, it's also become a hotbed for WordPress-related courses. The best part is that the offering is so diverse that you can pick and choose the WordPress skills you need to hone without having to enroll in a massive start to finish course where you need to skip over the things you already know.

Oh, wait...that's not the best part!

The best part is that many of the courses are taught by our extremely talented and knowledgeable WordCamp friends such as Carrie Dils and Morten Rand-Hendriksen...folks who have been giving back far more to the WordPress community than they've ever taken from it.

Prices for courses on LinkedIn learning vary by topic and author.

 

WordPress Training Resource #2: WP 101

We first met Shawn Hesketh during one of our annual trips to the Pressnomics conference which was held in Phoenix for several years. He’s not only an incredibly genuine guy with a true love for the WordPress community, but he also “accidentally” created one of the first and largest WordPress training libraries called WP 101.

After spending a few years developing sites for clients which were built on WordPress, he realized that requests from clients to help them update their own sites began eating into his billable time. And as with most great business ideas, a problem lead to an opportunity.

Shawn began creating a video library so that his web design clients could help themselves with minor updates to their WordPress-powered site. And WP 101 was born.

This is another paid/premium training offering. But at $49 per year for unlimited access to all of the outstanding WordPress training they’ve produced over the years, it’s a no-brainer. Plus, they boast over 2 million clients since they launched…that’s quite the testimonial.

WP 101 not only offers generalized crash course overviews of WordPress usage, but also courses in specific functionality related to popular plugins such as WooCommerce and Ninja Forms.

 

WordPress Training Resource #3: WP Beginner

Everyone on our team has been a struggling first-time entrepreneur at some point, so we certainly understand that even a $49 or $99 investment can be a stretch when there are so many other costs associated with starting your own website, blog, or business.

That being said, premium paid options such as LinkedIn Learning or WP 101 aren’t your only options. Several years ago, our friend Syed Balkhi created an incredibly helpful WordPress tutorial and news site called WP Beginner.

And guess what? All of the content is free!

If you’re a complete newbie to WordPress, it’s a bit more difficult to piece together exactly what you need to walk through to build your first site with a free WordPress training site like WP Beginner. Paid courses such as those found on LinkedIn Learning and WP 101 offer a clear cut path for those building their first WordPress site.

However, WP Beginner has tutorials on hundreds of details and tasks related to specific WordPress functionality, most with accompanying YouTube tutorial videos. This makes it a perfect follow-up resource after you’ve had a proper WordPress training course primer and if you’re looking for help with something granular which is more specific to your use case.