What this guide is for

Read Part 1 once. Use the rest when you need it.

You have a working online shop. This guide shows you how to run it: how to log in, see an order, send it out, change a price, edit your own words on a page, and find the setting you are looking for without hunting.

It assumes you have never used Hostinger, WordPress or WooCommerce before. Nothing here needs code, and nothing here can be broken by reading it. Every screen you will use is pictured, with a numbered marker on the exact button the steps refer to.

The three parts of your store

Three separate things, stacked. Knowing which one you are in saves most of the confusion.

WooCommerce lives inside WordPress, and WordPress lives on Hostinger. That is why your products are under one menu and your pages are under another: they belong to two different pieces of software that have been joined together.

Logging in

Two boxes and a button.

Your login details were given to you at handover. Keep them somewhere safe, ideally a password manager, and never share them: People with access shows how to give someone else their own login instead.

1 is your username or the email address on your account. 2 is your password. 3 is Log In. 4 sends a reset link if you have forgotten it.

Do this

1. Open a browser and type your web address followed by /wp-admin, for example yourstore.com/wp-admin. Bookmark the page that appears.
2. Type your username or email address, then your password.
3. Click Log In. You land on the Dashboard, and the dark bar across the top tells you that you are signed in.
4. When you are finished on a shared or public computer, hover your name at the top right of that bar and click Log Out.

Your public side and your admin side

The same website, seen two ways.

The public side is what your customers see. The admin side is the control panel, and only people you have given a login can reach it. You get to the admin side by adding /wp-admin to the end of your web address.

The one rule that matters

Nothing you type is saved until you press the button.

Every screen in WordPress has a save button, and it is called something different depending on where you are: Update on a page or a product, Save changes in settings, Publish on something new.

If you type a new price and then click away to another screen, the price does not change. There is no automatic save, and usually no warning.

Getting around

The menu down the left is the whole system. You will use four items out of it.

Everything you can do lives in the dark column down the left of the admin. It is a long list, and most of it belongs to WordPress rather than to your shop. The four marked in the picture are the ones you will actually use:

	What it holds
1 Pages	The words on your website.
2 WooCommerce	Orders, customers and every shop setting.
3 Products	Your catalog: prices, stock, photos.
4 Analytics	What sold, and to whom.

The rest belongs to WordPress and to the plugins that add features to your shop. You are not expected to use most of it, and nothing on it will break by being looked at.

Hover, do not click

Resting your mouse on a menu item opens its sub-menu without leaving the page you are on. It is the quickest way to find something when you are not sure where it lives.

Where everything lives

One page to keep open. What you want to do, where the screen is, and the page that walks you through it.

Orders: your daily routine

The screen to open every morning.

1 Update saves any change you make on this screen. 2 is the status. 3 is the note box: switch it to Note to customer and what you type is emailed to them, which is how you send a tracking number.

Then, inside the order

1. If you have a tracking number, type it into the note box, change Private note to Note to customer, and click Add. The customer receives it by email.
2. Change the status to Completed, then click Update. This is what triggers the email telling your customer it is on the way.

What the order statuses mean

Five words that describe every order you will ever get.

Refunds

Two different things that look the same.

A refund returns money. Changing an order's status to Refunded does not, on its own, move any money. It is a label.

1 how many of each item to refund. 2 whether they go back into stock. 3 the button that actually returns the money. It says manually here; with a card provider connected there is a second button that refunds through them.

Do this

1. Open the order.
2. Scroll to the list of items and click Refund.
3. Type how many of each item you are refunding, or type an amount directly.
4. Choose the button that refunds through your payment provider if it is offered. That is the one that actually sends the money back.
5. If you refund outside the system, for example by bank transfer, use the manual option so your records still match.

Taking an order over the phone

You can create an order yourself, without the customer using the website.

Useful when somebody orders by phone, by message, or at an event. The order behaves exactly like one placed online, so your stock and your reports stay correct.

1 Create saves it. 2 the pencil opens the address boxes. 3 Add items is where you pick what they are buying. 4 Recalculate works out shipping and tax.

Do this

1. Go to WooCommerce, then Orders, then Add order.
2. Fill in the customer's billing and shipping details.
3. Under Items, click Add items, then Add products, and pick what they are buying.
4. Click Recalculate so shipping and any tax are worked out.
5. Save, and set the status to match reality: Processing if they have paid, or Pending payment if they have not.
6. Use Customer payment page in the order actions to send them a link to pay.

Your customers

Everyone who has bought, in one list.

This list builds itself. Every checkout adds a row, so you never have to type a customer in. It is the quickest way to answer the two questions that come up most: has this person bought before, and what did they buy last time.

Products, prices and stock

Everything you sell lives here.

To change a price or a stock number quickly:

To change anything else, click the product name to open it fully. The two sections worth knowing are:

Adding a new product

Seven steps from blank to live.

Products that come in several sizes

One product, several options, one page. This is a variable product.

If something sells in more than one size or strength, do not create a separate product for each. Make one product with variations, so the customer picks from a dropdown on a single page.

Discount codes

A code the customer types at checkout.

Bulk and tiered pricing

Automatic discounts. This is NOT the same as a coupon.

Certificates and lab documents

Only if your products are lab tested. Where the paperwork goes.

If your products come with a certificate of analysis, that document is the thing your customer is really buying. It belongs somewhere they can find it without asking you.

Editing the words on a page

Click the words, type, press Update.

Adding a new page

A blank page, live in five steps.

Adding a page to your menu

Your menu is part of the design, not a separate screen.

This theme does not have the old Appearance, Menus screen. The navigation is a block inside your header, so you edit it in the same place you edit the design.

Adding your social media links

Where your Instagram, Facebook or TikTok links live.

Social links belong in your footer, and the footer is part of the design, so this works exactly like the menu (Adding a page to your menu): you edit it in the Site Editor. The block you want is called Social Icons. It draws the recognisable logo for each service and links it to your profile.

Images

Media holds every image on your site.

You do not usually come here to add an image. It is easier to add images from inside the product or page you are working on, and they land here automatically.

Come here when you want to find something you uploaded before, or to delete files you no longer use.

Changing how the site looks

Powerful, and the easiest place to make a mess.

The Site Editor is where the design lives: colors, fonts, the header and the footer. It is a real design tool, and it will let you change things everywhere at once.

Editing the words inside a page is safe and covered in Editing the words on a page. This is different: a change here applies across the whole site.

The age check on your store

The panel every visitor sees before they can browse.

Your store asks visitors to confirm their age before it shows them anything. We set this up as part of the build and it is switched on already. You only need this page if you want to change the age or the wording.

Your store settings

The tabs across the top are the whole shop.

Shipping

What you charge to send things, by place.

Shipping works in two layers. A zone is a place, such as the United States. Inside each zone you add the rates people there can choose from, such as a flat rate of twelve dollars, or free over three hundred.

Tax

The tab only appears once tax is switched on.

Whether you charge tax, and how much, depends on where you are registered and what you sell. That is a question for your accountant, and it is the one part of this guide where the right answer is genuinely not ours to give.

The emails your store sends

Worth ten minutes, once.

Your shop sends email on its own: a receipt when someone orders, a note when you mark it Completed, an alert to you when a new order arrives. This tab is where you set who they come from and what they say.

Setting up your business email

The single most valuable hour you will spend on setup.

An address on your own domain, such as orders@yourstore.com, does two jobs. It looks like a real business, and it is what your shop sends order confirmations from. Those two are connected, and the second one is why this matters more than it looks.

If we set this up with you on your handover call, it is already done and this section is here so you can add another address or change one later. If not, it is yours to do and it takes about ten minutes.

Understanding your sales

Separate from the numbers on your dashboard, and more useful.

Getting your orders out for your accountant

Downloads as a spreadsheet your accountant can open.

People with access

One login per person, always.

Repeat orders and subscriptions

Products that bill again on a schedule.

A subscription is a product a customer is billed for again automatically. If you sell something people reorder on a cycle, this is the cheapest revenue you will ever get, because you are not paying to acquire the same customer twice.

Your affiliate program

People who send you customers, for a commission.

An affiliate is someone who sends you customers through their own tracked link and earns a commission on what those customers buy. The tool is installed and the sign-up pages exist, but nothing happens and nothing gets paid until you set a rate and approve people.

The tracking is automatic. An approved affiliate gets a personal link; anyone who clicks it is remembered for the length of your cookie window, and if that person buys at any point inside the window, even weeks later on a different day, the sale is credited to the affiliate. That window is why affiliates are happy to promote you: they still get paid when the buyer thinks about it for a fortnight first.

Plugins

Each one adds a feature. Each one can also take one away.

A plugin is an add-on. Your shop itself is one. So are your subscriptions, your discount rules, your affiliate program and the tool that keeps the site fast. Deactivating one removes whatever it does.

Keeping things up to date

The red number on the left menu is this screen.

WordPress, your theme and every plugin release new versions regularly, mostly to fix security holes. The red number next to Updates in the left menu is how many are waiting. Ignoring it for months is how a site ends up hacked, and it is a ten minute job once a month.

Why the site sometimes looks out of date

The reason your change did not appear.

Your site keeps a saved copy of each page so it loads fast. After you edit something, visitors can briefly still be served the old copy. This is normal and it is what makes the site quick.

If something looks wrong

Work down this list before assuming anything is broken.

Hostinger: where your website actually lives

The layer underneath WordPress. You will visit it rarely, which is why it is worth knowing now.

Hostinger is the company that rents you the computer your shop runs on. Its control panel is called hPanel, and you log in to it at hpanel.hostinger.com with the email address and password from your Hostinger account, not your WordPress ones.

Backups, and undoing a mistake

The safety net. Worth testing once before you need it.

Hostinger takes a backup of your whole site every day and keeps them for weeks. If something goes badly wrong, restoring one puts everything back to how it was, and it is far faster than trying to unpick what happened.

Renewals: the one thing that can switch the shop off

Check it once now, and after any change of card.

Your hosting is a subscription and so is your domain. Both renew automatically as long as auto-renewal is switched on and the card on file works. If either lapses, the site goes offline and any email on the domain stops with it. It is the only failure in this guide that a backup cannot fix, and it is entirely avoidable.

Words you will see

The vocabulary, in plain terms. Nothing here needs remembering; it is here for the day a screen uses a word you do not know.

From here on

What you own, and what happens next.

The build is finished and the store is yours. The hosting, the domain, the logins, the backups and everything on the site belong to you, and nothing about running it from here depends on us.

Almost everything that comes up is already covered in the pages before this one. Two are worth remembering because they look like faults and are not. A change that has not appeared is nearly always the saved copy, which is Why the site sometimes looks out of date. And nothing you do is permanent, because the whole site can be put back to how it was, which is Backups, and undoing a mistake.

Keep this guide where you can find it. It describes the store as we built it, so it will still be accurate long after handover.