If an agency built your site and handed it over, the training your team needs is short and specific. Two or three people, working in your own site instead of a demo, at the level their role calls for, with a written list of what is safe to touch. This guide covers how to pick the level, what a session works through, what to have ready before I arrive, and what to look for three months later.
The handover itself tends to go one way: a launch email, then a forty-minute walkthrough on a video call with three staff on it, two taking notes and one half in another meeting. The recording goes to a shared drive, to be opened once, in nine months, by someone who no longer works there. Then the contract ends, and your communications coordinator owns a content management system nobody taught them.
What happens next is predictable, and it is not incompetence. It is caution. People stop touching anything they are not certain about. The events page goes stale because nobody is sure whether events are Posts or a custom thing. Content pasted in from Word arrives with strange fonts. Images go up at four thousand pixels wide. Updates sit unapplied for a year because the person with the login is afraid that clicking the button will take the site down, and honestly, once, somewhere, it did.
The real cost is the queue
Count the things waiting to go on the site right now. A staff bio. A policy PDF. Three event listings. A news item that was topical two weeks ago. What blocks it is one person being the only one who can safely do it, and that person being busy. The site becomes a bottleneck with a name on it, and the organization routes around it: the PDF goes out by email, the event is announced only on social, and the website stops being where current information lives.
Training fixes the bottleneck, and the fix is confidence rather than clicks. Anyone can find the Publish button. The point is two or three people who can use it without asking permission first.
Train on your actual site, not a demo
A generic WordPress course teaches a clean install with a default theme. That is a fair way to teach concepts and a poor way to prepare someone for Monday morning, because your site is not a clean install. It has a theme somebody customized, a block pattern library or page builder the agency set up, a handful of plugins, and two or three settings that would cause real damage if changed.
When I train onsite, we work in your site. Your staff log in with their own accounts, on their own machines, and we build a real page that you keep. Along the way we write down the two lists that matter and that no generic course can give you: the things in this specific site that are safe to change any time, and the things nobody touches without calling someone. That second list is short, and having it written down is worth more than most of the rest of the day. The case for doing this in your building rather than over a webinar is its own guide: onsite versus webinar training.
Match the level to the role, not the job title
Communications teams do not all need the same training, and putting everyone through the same day wastes half the room. The four WordPress courses are routed by the work a person does on the site.
| Who | What they need to do on Monday | Level | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content editors | Publish news, events and staff pages in the block editor, handle images, know a Post from a Page | WordPress training 101 | Full day, six hours, onsite in Ontario or online |
| The person who wants content found | Content structure, internal linking, image SEO, Core Web Vitals | WordPress training 201 | Online only, full day or half day |
| The site owner | Updates, tested backups, user roles, a written incident routine | WordPress training 301 | Online only, full day or half day |
| In-house developers | theme.json and building a custom block end to end | WordPress training 401 | Online only, single full day |
The content editors are the people who write and publish: news, events, staff pages, program updates. They need the block editor to stop fighting them. WordPress.org's documentation notes the block editor has been the default since WordPress 5.0 in December 2018, so a course built around the older classic editor teaches a screen your staff will not see. They also need the Post versus Page distinction to stop being a guess. WordPress.org draws it plainly: Posts appear in reverse chronological order on the blog's home page, and Pages are for non-chronological content such as About or Contact. If your team's job is publishing, 101 is the whole answer.
The site owner is whoever gets called at nine on a Saturday when something breaks, and they need 301: updates, backups they have actually tested restoring, user roles set so a co-op student cannot delete a page, and a written incident routine. If your organization has no such person today, deciding who it will be matters more than the training. A communications team does not need 401.
Pricing is published on each course page: 101, 201, and 301 are listed at $750 to $1,495 CAD plus HST per session, and 401 at $1,495 to $4,485 CAD plus HST. Those are session prices for a group rather than per-seat fees, which is why training three staff together is the sensible shape.
What to have ready before the session
A day in your own site works better when a few things are sorted first. None of them take technical skill.
- A login for each learner under their own name, not a shared office account.
- The real queue of bios, PDFs and event listings waiting to go up. We publish those in the session.
- Who holds the hosting account login, even if they are not in the room.
- Whether a backup exists, where it lives, and whether anyone has ever restored from it.
- Whatever the agency handed over: the recording, the PDF, the list of plugins.
- A list of every account on the site and its role. The next section explains why.
The roles conversation nobody has until it is too late
While I am in the building, there is a five-minute conversation worth having: who has Administrator access on this site right now?
WordPress.org describes an Administrator as somebody with access to all the administration features within a single site. An Editor can publish and manage posts, including other people's. An Author can publish and manage their own posts. A Contributor can write their own posts but cannot publish them.
Answers that should worry you: the agency still has an Administrator account, so does a former employee, there is an office login shared by four people, and a plugin vendor was given one during setup. Each is a small risk nobody has looked at since launch. The fix is a handful of clicks on the Users screen. It is covered properly in 301, but I raise it in every session because the fix is cheap and the list is already sitting there.
Updates belong in the same conversation. WordPress.org's update documentation says minor and security releases apply themselves in the background on sites that support it, while major releases still need someone to click Update Now, and it recommends a backup first. That is why 301 spends a block on updates and restores: the site owner should know which updates happen on their own, which wait for a person, and how to get back to yesterday if one goes wrong.
What to look for three months on
The signs a session worked are unglamorous, and you can check them yourself. Content goes up the same week it is written. Nobody emails the agency to change a phone number. Image filenames stop being IMG_4471.jpg. Updates get applied on a schedule instead of during a panic. And when the coordinator is on vacation, somebody else can post the notice.
None of that requires anyone to become technical. It requires two or three people to stop being afraid of the dashboard.
It requires two or three people to stop being afraid of the dashboard.
If WordPress is one of several tools your staff need a day on, the PD day guide covers fitting it alongside Excel or Word.
Getting started
Tell me what your site runs on, roughly how many staff need access, and what is stuck in the queue. I will come back with a recommended level, a written quote, and a date. If your team only needs 101 and somebody suggested more, you will hear that from me before you hear a price.
Checked against WordPress.org help pages on September 21, 2026: Create pages, Roles and Capabilities, Updating WordPress, WordPress Block Editor
