I always thought building a website meant learning to code. For years, whenever I imagined putting something of my own online, I pictured lines of HTML and CSS scrolling past me like the Matrix. So when I finally sat down to build my first site with WordPress, I expected a wall. What I got instead was a much stranger, more humbling experience — closer to decorating a room than writing software.

The Setup Was Easier Than I Feared

I bought a domain and hosting on the same afternoon. The hosting company had a “one-click WordPress install” button, which I clicked with the suspicion of someone pressing an elevator button that promises to go faster if you press it twice. Fifteen minutes later, I had a login screen and a live URL. That part genuinely surprised me. I had budgeted a whole weekend just to get to the dashboard.

The dashboard itself, though — that was where the humility began.

The Theme Rabbit Hole

I opened the “Themes” tab and lost the next three hours.

Every theme looked beautiful in the preview. Every one of them looked completely different once I installed it on my actual site with my actual (nonexistent) content. I must have installed and deleted fifteen themes before I understood something important: a theme is not a design. It is a container waiting for a design. The demo sites I was drooling over had been staged with professional photos, carefully written copy, and dummy testimonials from people who did not exist.

I eventually settled on a clean, free theme called Astra. Not because it was the prettiest, but because it did the least. I was learning that in WordPress, the less a theme forces on you, the more room you have to make mistakes and recover from them.

Plugins: The Slippery Slope

Then came plugins, and I nearly broke everything.

I installed a page builder (Elementor), an SEO plugin (Yoast), a caching plugin, a security plugin, a contact form plugin, a plugin that added animations, a plugin that added a cookie banner, and — for reasons I still cannot explain — a plugin that added a live chat widget to a website with zero visitors.

By the end of day two, my site was loading slowly, the admin dashboard was cluttered with notifications begging me to upgrade to Pro, and two of the plugins were fighting each other over who got to control my forms. I disabled everything and started again with three plugins. That was my second real lesson: every plugin is a small tenant living in your website, and each one wants rent, attention, and occasionally starts a fire.

Design Is Not the Same as Decoration

The page builder taught me the difference between designing and decorating.

I spent an entire evening picking a shade of blue. I spent another evening arguing with myself about whether the “About” section should have rounded corners. Meanwhile, my homepage still had no clear headline, no reason for a visitor to stay, and a hero image of a stock-photo woman laughing at a salad.

When I finally forced myself to close the builder and write out — on paper — what I actually wanted a visitor to feel and do, the design got much simpler. One clear headline. One clear action. One image that meant something. The site stopped looking like a template and started looking like mine.

The Small Things That Broke My Brain

A few things nobody warns you about:

  • I did not know what these were until my blog posts started showing up as /?p=47. Changing the permalink setting to “Post name” was a one-minute fix I discovered after two hours of frustration.
  • The gap between mobile and desktop. My homepage looked perfect on my laptop and like a collapsing accordion on my phone. Every element needs to be checked twice.
  • Fonts loading slowly. I picked a beautiful Google Font, and it made my page take an extra two seconds to appear. Speed, I learned, is part of design.
  • I broke my site once by editing a theme file directly. Since then, I back up before I touch anything.

What I Would Tell Past Me

If I could sit down with the person who clicked that “one-click install” button, I would tell him three things.

First, pick a boring theme and let your content do the interesting work. Second, install plugins the way you would adopt pets — only when you truly need one, and only after understanding what it will cost you to keep it alive. Third, the site is never really finished, and that is fine. My first WordPress site is still ugly in places I have not gotten to yet. But it exists, on a real domain, doing a real thing, and that is more than most of the beautiful designs I once scrolled through and admired.

WordPress did not teach me how to code. It taught me how to make decisions.