How To Add A Blog In WordPress

The popularity of blogging is skyrocketing, with over 115.9 million bloggers in the U.S., and billions of blogs in existence worldwide. Blogging can be a great way to share ideas, thoughts, and opinions but it’s not without its challenges. There are many different platforms that bloggers use to publish their work, and WordPress is one of the most popular for both personal and business blogs alike. But how do you add a blog in WordPress? We know it has the “Posts” menu, but how do you see all the posts on a page? Let’s dive in and see how to add a blog in WordPress.

Blogging in WordPress

Blogging or posting articles/posts is one of the core features of WordPress. Though articles are called posts and there are custom post types that can be created and edited through a bit of coding the posts stay as the main place where you will be writing your news, ideas, and overall blog posts for others to see. Thanks to the new and ever-evolving Gutenberg editor, blogging has been made even simpler, and it’s easy to add custom layouts to even blog posts. Though some still do love and wish the old WYSIWYG editor would come back (as do I from time to time) Gutenberg has been a huge step forward.

If you are not into Gutenberg, but still want an easy way to build and edit your site, consider getting the Elementor Pro.

How To Add An Archive page

What is an archive page in WordPress? In its most simple form, it’s the page that shows all of your blog posts. For example, a category page with all the posts that belong to a category “News” or “Tech” would be an archive page. They all use the archive.php as their template to showcase all the posts belonging to that category.

If you wish to create it by hand you can create a new template called “archive.php” to your current theme or child theme folder and add the code from below to the archive.php file. This code will create a simple archive.php page. Below you can find an example code for archive.php, though this usually is already in your theme.

<?php
/*
Template Name: Archives
*/
get_header(); ?>

<div id="container">
	<div id="content" role="main">

		<?php the_post(); ?>
		<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
		
		<?php get_search_form(); ?>
		
		<h2>Archives by Month:</h2>
		<ul>
			<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
		</ul>
		
		<h2>Archives by Subject:</h2>
		<ul>
			 <?php wp_list_categories(); ?>
		</ul>

	</div><!-- #content -->
</div><!-- #container -->

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Something to note about archives is that if you go and edit your arhive.php you are changing ALL of the archive pages. This means all the category pages etc. that use the archive as a template.

To further customize your archive page you can check out WordPress comprehensive Templates codex.

How to add a blog with Elementor

But what if you don’t want to create an archive page from scratch with code? Well, then you can use a page builder like Elementor for that. To create an archive page in Elementor you’re going to need the Elementor Pro.

To get started with Elementor head on to your dashboard and find “Templates”.

  1. Under Templates > Theme Builder > Archive > Add New, select Archive from the dropdown and click Create Template.
  1. Choose an Archive Block and Insert. Note that this is optional and alternatively, you can design your own.
  1. Click the gear icon in the lower-left corner of the widget panel to select a specific archive as the preview example while editing.
  2. Edit any elements as you’d like. After you’ve finished designing, click Publish.
  3. Choose a Condition. Conditions are used so you can decide when this archive template is used. For example, if you wish to use different templates for author archives and posts you can with the conditions.

Reading settings

To make the final touches head back to your WordPress dashboard. Here select “Settings > Reading” and select the “Posts page”. This is required so WordPress knows what page it should use to show the archive.php you just created.

Other good settings to edit while here are:

  • Blog pages show at most – Determines how many blog posts are shown on the archive page
  • Syndication feeds show the most recent – Determines how many blog posts are shown in your feed
  • For each post in a feed, include – Excerpt (show users must click to your page to see the whole post and so other pages can’t simply pull all your posts from the feed).
  • Search engine visibility – Remember to leave this UNCHECKED to ensure your site is found by search engines like Google. For more SEO tips read our Ultimate Guide To WordPress SEO For Beginners.

Conclusion

To add a blog to your WordPress page isn’t hard but does take some technical know-how if you are not using a page builder like Elementor Pro or a theme with preset archive.php templates like Kadence, Astra, or GeneratePress. For those who want more options to visually edit their page from top to bottom we highly recommend turning to Elementor Pro in that case.

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