How to Edit Your WordPress Site Yourself

Your website will change, and that is normal

A website is never finished: it is maintained. You raise a price, change address, stop offering a service or have new photos taken. These changes always come, and they often come unexpectedly.

As you saw in the block editor and your website’s global styles, you already know where everything is. This page gives you the techniques you need to deal with those changes when they arise and tells you when it is worth handing the task to artificial intelligence, if the change genuinely calls for it.

From the beginning, Scale & Own’s goal is for you to retain independence and control over your digital assets. You do not gain that control by doing everything manually or by delegating everything. You gain it by knowing what artificial intelligence does well and understanding the tools that keep you in charge.

If you have followed the journey, artificial intelligence has just built your website. This is the part where you learn to maintain it.

The rule: the size of the change determines who makes it

Before touching anything, decide how extensive the change is. This will save you more time than anything else over the coming months.

What changed	Who handles it
A piece of text, a price, an address or a telephone number	You, in under a minute
A photo or illustration	You
Several photos, or all the photos	Ask artificial intelligence
A new section: three cards, testimonials or an FAQ	Ask artificial intelligence to create it, then paste it in
The colours or typefaces across the entire website	You, once, in Styles
The entire page no longer reflects your business	Ask artificial intelligence for a new version

One sentence sums up everything else: you do not rebuild a page because an address has changed. If one detail changes, change that detail. Rebuilding an entire page because of a price means throwing away work that was already reviewed and approved, then giving yourself the job of reviewing it again. It also means spending your artificial intelligence tokens on something that was already done.

Change text

This is the most common and easiest case.

• Open your dashboard by entering your website address followed by /wp-admin, then sign in.
• In the menu on the left, click Pages (or Posts if it is a blog article).
• Find the page in the list and click its name.
• Click the text you want to change. The cursor appears there, just as it does in a document.
• Type the new text.
• Click Save in the top-right corner.

That is all. The change is published.

If you do not see it on your website immediately, nothing is broken. Your website stores a copy of its pages so that it can serve them faster. Refresh with Ctrl + F5.

Change an image

This is almost as quick.

• Open the page as before.
• Click the image you want to replace.
• In the toolbar that appears above it, click Replace.
• Choose Open Media Library if the photo has already been uploaded, or Upload if it is new.
• Click Save.

One detail that almost nobody completes is worth the effort: when the image is selected, there is a field called Alternative Text in the panel on the right. Write a short sentence describing the photo. This helps people who browse with screen readers and also helps Google understand the image.

If there are many photos, do not upload them one by one. Arrange them in your folder with names that make sense, then ask artificial intelligence to replace the images on that page. The arrangement is the same as in the previous step: it uploads and places them; you supervise.

When the change affects the structure, ask artificial intelligence

There comes a time when you want something that the settings panel does not provide: an entire new section, a card in a different format or a frequently asked questions block.

You do not need to build it manually, and you do not need to copy and paste code. Use the connection to artificial intelligence that you set up in the previous step. Tell it which page to edit, what you want to change and what it must leave untouched. It will edit the page directly in your WordPress website.

Here is an example of a request that works:

On the home page, replace the section immediately below the hero with a trust strip containing these words: Serenity, Purity, Delicacy, Naturalness, Calm. Display them on a single line that scrolls horizontally and continuously, marquee-style, repeating in a loop. Use native WordPress blocks and the colours and typefaces from my instruction document. Do not change any other section on the page or any other file.

When it has finished, open the page in WordPress and expand List View. You will see the new section or block in the position you requested. Check it in the browser and on mobile as well. If it is correct, approve it. If not, tell the AI exactly what to correct.

If the change affects the entire website, not one page

If you want to change your brand colour or typeface, do not edit the code in one block. You would be fixing one page and leaving all the others unchanged.

You make that change in one place:

Appearance → Editor → Styles

Change the colour there and the entire website will update, including pages you have not opened for months. That is what you set up in your website’s global styles.

The rule is simple: if the change affects only this page, open the block. If it affects the entire website, open Styles.

When is it worth rebuilding the entire page?

There is one case when asking artificial intelligence for the complete page is worthwhile: when almost everything has changed.

You changed your services. You replaced the entire catalogue. The page no longer describes what your business does today. In that case, there is no point working block by block. Give the AI the new information and ask it to rebuild the page.

Apart from that, do not do it. Every time you ask for a new page because of one detail, artificial intelligence may change things that were already right, leaving you to review everything again.

If only the photos change, even if you replace all of them, that is not rebuilding the page. It is asking the AI to replace the images.

Undo a change when something goes wrong

This is what removes the fear, so it is worth knowing before you touch anything.

While you are editing, Ctrl + Z undoes the last change, just as it does in any other program. You can use it several times in succession.

If you have already saved, WordPress keeps a history of each page. Revisions are in the panel on the right, under the Page tab. You can see how the page looked before, compare versions and restore an earlier one. The number of revisions retained may depend on your hosting provider.

In practice, editing text and images does not break anything. You should be more careful with the header and footer because those changes apply to the entire website at once.

Next step

You now have what you need: a completed website and the ability to maintain it without depending on anybody.

One final step remains, and it is what will help the website last. Next, you will learn how to optimise your website with essential plugins for security, backups, speed and SEO, without installing too many. That is also where you will publish your website for real.

Frequently asked questions