Content is what visitors to your site are looking for.

Just as visitors to your home don’t check out how the foundation was poured or the framing, visitors to your website don’t generally care about those elements either.

As long as your navigation works and the site is visually pleasing, they’ll focus on the content.

That’s as it should be.

#1. Select Posts/Add New

Notice the Posts item on the left-hand side of the dashboard. When you hover over it, you’ll see All Posts, Add New, Categories and Tags.

Click Add New and you’ll see a screen that looks like this. This is your editing window. You can make it distraction free by clicking the hamburger (three dots) menu to the far right of the upper navigation bar, then selecting Fullscreen Mode.

It doesn’t look like much, does it?

Adding the post is very simple — add a title, and create some content, then save it and publish it.

Seeing this nearly blank screen can feel a little overwhelming at first, but it’s not hard once you understand the most basic concept — that everything is built with blocks.

Let’s take a closer look.

#2. Add Blocks

In the old Classic Editor, you worked with a single block that incorporated text, headings, images, etc. In Gutenberg, each of those items is a separate block.

Now, if you’re simply typing paragraph after paragraph, you don’t have to do anything special. But if you want to add a heading, an image, a table, or any other type of block (and there are a lot of them!), you need to specify the type of block you’re adding.

You do that by clicking on the + sign, either on the editing screen or at the top of the window on the left, then selecting the type of block you want to add. These choices will change contextually, depending on what blocks you use most frequently. We’ll get into that in more detail later.

Once you click the plus sign, you’ll see a dropdown with all the available blocks. Some are part of WordPress core, and others are added by your theme or plugins. If you look at the choices below, all of them are part of WordPress core except the last, which is there because this site uses the Strong Testimonials plugin.

At the top is a Search box, so if you know the name of the block you want, you can type it into the search box.

Below the search are three tabs — Blocks, Patterns, and Reusable. We’ll start with the blocks that are part of WordPress core. These are the blocks common to every WordPress site.

Below I’ve listed the different types of blocks, and the core blocks available for each type.

Widgets

Yes, you can now put widgets anywhere on a post or a page using the Widgets block! Your available widgets will vary depending on your theme and plugins, but will usually include:

Yoast

If you’ve installed the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll also have Yoast Structured Data Blocks and Yoast Internal Linking Blocks.

Patterns

Patterns give you options for combining several blocks into a pattern.

Reusable

You can make any block, from any page or post, reusable. The uses for this are endless. Once you’ve created a reusable block, it will be available to you in the blocks menu under the Reusable tab.

Context Sensitive Menus

One of the big ways the Gutenberg editor differs from the Classic Editor is that the menus are context sensitive. That means, they change depending on what you’re doing at that moment.

When you add or highlight a paragraph, your menu looks like this:

But when you’re working on an image, here’s what the menu looks like:

If you’re going along adding paragraph after paragraph, just type the way you do normally. When you hit the Return key, WordPress automatically gives you a new Paragraph Block.

Some blocks can be swapped for related types. For example, you can change a Paragraph to a Heading very easily.

To change the Paragraph to a Heading block, click the paragraph symbol in the menubar immediately above the paragraph you want to change.

To create your page, just keep adding blocks until you’re done.

#3. Save and Publish

To the right of your editing window, you’ll see another set of menus, with two tabs. (If it’s not visible, click the settings button to display it.)

The first tab will say Page or Post depending on whether you’re adding a post or a page.

The second tab, Block, contains information about the block that’s currently highlighted.

Click the Page tab to see your document’s current status (published, draft, etc.), or move it to the trash.

This is also where you’ll view and edit the permalink, select categories and tags, set your featured image, write your excerpt, and specify whether you’ll allow comments. If you’re not familiar with these, don’t worry, we’ll cover them in upcoming tutorials.

Once you’re satisfied with your new post or page, you can publish it immediately by clicking the big blue Publish button at the top of the page, or schedule publication within the Status & visibility section of the Page or Post menu.

When you click the Publish button, you’ll have another opportunity to schedule publication for a later time. You’ll also see a reminder to add tags if you’ve omitted that step.

So there you have it — you can add a new WordPress post using the Gutenberg editor in three easy steps.

This tutorial was updated on July 14, 2022.

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• What is Gutenberg and Why Should I Care?
• Which is the Better Choice, Classic Editor or Gutenberg?