Every post or page has some common controls in WordPress. For more about editing the actual content, read this article on the WordPress block editor.
Saving, previewing, and publishing
New posts/pages
At the upper right of a new post, you’ll see three buttons: “Save draft”, “Preview”, and “Publish”.
- Saving as a draft means you can come back to it later, but it’s not public on your site.
- Previewing lets you see what it will look like for web site visitors without making it public for them.
- Publishing sends it live so anyone can view it.
Published posts/pages
After the post or page is published, the buttons change a little:
- “Switching to draft” will unpublish it from the live site, so use with care since this will break links and make it unavailable to visitors
- Preview works the same as for a new post – it lets you preview your changes without publishing them.
- Updating publishes the edits you’ve made and makes them publicly available to visitors.
More settings
When editing a post or page, there are several important settings on the right side.
Make sure the “Page” or “Post” tab is selected.
(If you don’t see the settings panel on the right, click the gear icon 
at the top)
The options are a little different for posts and pages, but many are similar.
Status & visibility
- Visibility
- Public: Open to anyone on the internet (default)
- Private: Only people logged in to WordPress on your site can see it
- Password protected: Anyone with the password you enter will be able to see it
Permalink
The part of the URL that gets set individually for each post or page.
There may be other parts of the URL that go before it that you can’t set for this individual post or page.
If you don’t enter anything here, typically it will be automatically generated from the title, but sometimes it ends up just being a number so it’s worth checking!
If you don’t see a field to edit the link, try clicking “Save draft” in the upper right.
Categories
(Only applies to posts, not pages.)
Use to organize your posts into a structure to make it easier to find related posts or filter by a specific topic. A good rule of thumb is that most posts probably want one or two categories.
Select an existing category or click “Add New Category” to create a new one.
Categories have a hierarchy: that means one category can be a sub-category of another, parent category.
Tags
Tags are more flexible than categories. They don’t have a hierarchy, and are much better for keywords that are less generally applicable than categories or are only for a few posts.
Add a tag if it’s not important enough for a category but you think it’s a topic someone’s likely to want to filter all posts by someday. If you get past a half a dozen or so, you might be adding too many.
When you start typing, you’ll get a list of previous tags from other posts. It’s usually better to re-use an existing tag than create a new one.
Featured image
The featured image will often be used for a preview in a listing of posts or pages, both within the site and elsewhere (like search engines and social media).
Excerpt
(Posts only)
Like the featured image, used for previews on the site and on search and social media.
Page Attributes
(Pages only)
If this page is a sub-page of another section that already has a page, set that section’s page as the parent.
Example: If you’re making a “Staff” page, consider setting it’s parent page to be the “About us” page.
