Training your communications team to manage the organization's WordPress site

The handover is always the same. The agency finishes the site, it looks good, there is a launch email, and somewhere in the final week there is a forty-minute walkthrough on a video call with three staff on it. Two of them are taking notes. One is half in another meeting. The recording is saved to a shared drive, where it will be opened once, in nine months, by someone who no longer works there.

Then the agency's 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 the events are Posts or a custom thing. New content gets pasted in from Word and arrives with strange fonts. Images go up at four thousand pixels wide because nobody mentioned that they shouldn't. 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 not the mistakes, it 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.

Almost none of that is blocked by difficulty. It is blocked by 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 starts routing around it: the PDF goes out by email instead, the event gets announced only on social, and eventually the website stops being where the current information lives.

That is what training fixes. Not the ability to click Publish, which anyone can figure out. The confidence for two or three people to do it without asking permission.

Train on your actual site, not a demo

Most WordPress courses teach a clean install of WordPress with a default theme. That is a reasonable way to teach the 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 page builder or a block pattern library the agency set up, a handful of plugins, a specific way the homepage is assembled, and two or three settings that would cause real damage if somebody changed them.

The sandbox version of this is like rehearsing a speech in an empty room. Genuinely useful for finding your pacing. It does not prepare you for the actual room, with the microphone that cuts out and the one heckler by the door.

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 usually four or five items. Having it written down is worth more than most of the rest of the day.

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 content editors. Two or three people who write and publish: news, events, staff pages, program updates. They need to publish confidently, use the block editor without fighting it, handle images properly, and know the difference between a Post and a Page well enough that it stops being a guess. This is WordPress training 101, and for most organizations it is the whole answer.

The person who wants the content to be found. Once publishing is routine, the next question is why nothing ranks and why the site is slow on phones. That is content structure, internal linking, image SEO, and Core Web Vitals, which is WordPress training 201.

The site owner. Usually one person, sometimes the IT generalist, sometimes the communications manager by default. They are the one who will be called at nine on a Saturday when something breaks. They need updates, backups they have actually tested restoring, user roles set so a co-op student cannot delete a page, and a written incident routine. That is WordPress training 301, and if your organization has no such person today, identifying who it is going to be matters more than the training.

The developer. If you have in-house developers maintaining a custom theme, WordPress training 401 is a senior-to-senior day on theme.json and building a custom block end to end, taught by someone who has been building WordPress themes and plugins since long before Lakeview Training existed as a name. Most communications teams do not need this. If you do, you already know.

Pricing is published on each page: 101, 201, and 301 are listed at $750 to $1,495 CAD per session, and 401 at $1,495 to $4,485 CAD. Those are session prices for a group rather than per-seat fees, which is why training three staff together is usually the sensible shape.

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?

The usual answer is the agency, a former employee, a general office login shared by four people, and possibly a plugin vendor. Each of those is a small risk that nobody has looked at since launch. Fixing it takes minutes, requires no technical skill, and is the single highest-value thing most organizations can do to their WordPress site. It is covered properly in 301, but it comes up in every session because it is always sitting there.

What good looks like afterward

Three months after a session that worked, the signs are unglamorous. Content goes up the same week it is written. Nobody emails the agency to change a phone number. The 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.

Getting started

Tell me what your site runs on, roughly how many staff need access, and what is currently stuck in the queue waiting to be published. I will come back with a recommended level, a written quote, and a date. If your team only needs 101 and somebody suggested they need more, I will say so.