User Guide

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1. Welcome

Tilo is a WordPress plugin that gives you a finished website instead of a blank page. You pick one of hundreds of ready-made layouts, answer a few questions, and Tilo builds the pages, the menu, the colours and the fonts. Then you change any word or picture in a visual editor that shows the page exactly as visitors will see it.

Tilo is made so you can spend your time on your content. The design, the menu, the pages and the languages are taken care of.

What you can do with it

• Start from a finished website. Every layout has its own photos and all its pages: home, about, services, contact and more.
• Edit on the page itself. Click anything to change it, drag it to move it, switch between desktop, tablet and phone while you work.
• Use any language. Every layout comes in English and in Arabic. For any other language, left to right or right to left, copy a page or the whole website and change the words. Right-to-left languages are treated as equals: menus, sliders, arrows and spacing mirror by themselves.
• Change the look once. Colours, fonts, sizes and buttons live in one screen, and every page follows.
• Add what a site needs. Forms with an inbox, appointments, popups, search engine tools, headers and footers, and more than eighty building blocks (modules).

What you need

2. Install Tilo

You download the plugin from the Tilo website and install it like any other WordPress plugin.

As soon as the plugin is active, Tilo takes you straight to the setup wizard. You can also open it later from the dashboard menu.

3. The setup wizard

The wizard builds your website in five short steps. Nothing on your site is deleted, and the pages it makes are new ones. The step bar at the top shows where you are: Language, Layout, Name, Look, Build, Done.

Step 1. Language

Step 2. Layout

A layout is a complete website with its own photos and pages. You can change every word and picture afterwards.

Step 3. Name

Type the Site name. It goes in the browser tab and in search results. The Short line under it is optional. Press Next: colours and fonts.

Step 4. Look

The Main, Second and Accent colours come from the layout. Click a colour to change it, or keep them all. Leave Use the fonts of this layout ticked to keep the layout's fonts. For a language with its own script, Tilo also fetches a suitable free font. You can change all of this later in Site Settings, and every page follows.

Step 5. Build

Step 6. Done

Press Open my website to see it. Under it, every page is listed with an Edit link that opens it in the editor. If you chose a second language, its pages are listed separately. Site settings opens the design settings, and Start again with another layout takes you back to step 2.

4. Your new website

When the wizard finishes you have a real website: pages, a menu, colours and fonts, a header and a footer, and your name in the browser tab. It is already responsive, so it reads well on a computer, a tablet and a phone.

Your pages in the dashboard

Open Pages in the dashboard to see every page. Pages made with Tilo carry the link Edit with Tilo when you hover over them. If you are signed in, the same link is in the black bar at the top of the website.

5. Edit a page

The editor is a full-screen page of its own. In the middle is the real page, drawn exactly as visitors see it. On the left are the page structure and the list of things you can add. On the right are the settings of whatever you selected.

The top bar

How a page is built

A page is made of sections (full-width bands). A section holds rows, a row holds columns, and a column holds modules: headings, text, pictures, buttons and so on. The Layers tab on the left shows this tree. Click an item to select it, drag it to move it, and open or close its branches with the small arrows.

Add something new

Each selected item also shows a small + on its sides. Press it to add something exactly there: above, below, or beside it. It offers only what fits that side.

See and edit for phone and tablet

6. Everyday how-tos

Change a picture

Change the background of a section

Change a button

Move, copy or delete something

Copy a style from one thing to another

Go back after a mistake

See the page as visitors will

Add a page of your own

7. Modules: the building blocks

A module is one building block: a heading, a slider, a form, a price table. There are 83 modules, each with its own settings panel. The Modules page of the Tilo website shows every one of them with its icon and a short description.

You can also add ready-made designs in one click from the Catalogue (see Layouts and ready-made designs).

8. Colours, fonts and spacing

Site Settings is one screen that controls the look of the whole website. Change a value here and every page that uses it follows. Open it from the dashboard menu: Tilo, Site Settings.

Fonts

Spacing, breakpoints and buttons

Further down the same screen you find Spacing (the space between and inside blocks), Breakpoints (the widths at which the layout changes for tablet and desktop), Buttons (primary, secondary, outline and link buttons, with shape and hover effect) and Back to top (the round button that returns visitors to the top of a long page).

9. Headers, footers and menus

The header and footer are designed in the same editor as any page. By default every page gets the default header and footer.

Menus

The wizard creates your main menu. To change it, go to Appearance, Menus in the dashboard, as with any WordPress menu. The Menu module shows a menu in a header, a footer or anywhere on a page. It can be horizontal or vertical, can open a mega menu, and turns into a phone menu at the breakpoint you choose.

10. More than one language

A Tilo website can have as many languages as you like, in any direction. The wizard builds English and a second language; for more, you copy a page or the whole website, choose the language and the direction, and change the words.

Copy a single page

Language and direction of the whole site, and of one page

The language and direction of the website are in Site Settings, Language. Direction can be Automatic (from language) or set by hand. Any single page can override the language and the direction from its own box. The WordPress dashboard keeps its own language.

11. Layouts and ready-made designs

Look at every layout before you choose

The Layouts page of the Tilo website shows every layout as a card. Each card lists its pages, and opens in a new tab so you can scroll through the real page.

In the viewer, press a page name to see that page, English or Arabic to switch language, and Desktop, Tablet or Phone to see how it looks at that size.

Add layouts to a site that already exists

Ready-made parts: the Catalogue

The Catalogue holds ready-made designs of single parts. They appear in your own colours and fonts, and you add one with a click.

Bring an old website along

Tilo, Import a design brings in a design or a whole site kit you already have, so you do not rebuild from the start.

12. Forms, messages and appointments

Tilo has its own form builder. Every message is kept on your site in an inbox, and emails go out through your own mailbox settings. The screens are in the dashboard menu: Forms, Inbox, Appointments, Mail and Connections.

Appointments adds opening hours, appointment length and breaks, no double booking, calendar files in the emails and reminders. Mail sets up sending through your own mailbox (SMTP). Connections sends entries to other services such as Slack, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Trello or Google Sheets.

13. Search engines (SEO)

Tilo does the work of an SEO plugin, so you do not need another one. If another SEO plugin (such as Yoast or Rank Math) is active, Tilo prints no duplicate tags.

Where to find everything

Open Tilo, SEO in the dashboard. The tabs across the top are: Overview, Google numbers, General, Search appearance, Business, Sitemap and crawlers, Redirects, Pages, Images, Site audit, Import and Tools. Overview is a checklist of what is set and what is missing, each with an Open link to the right tab.

The SEO panel in the editor

The panel also shows a score from the page checks (title and description length, the focus keyword, headings, picture descriptions, links, text length and readability) and suggests other pages of your site to link to. Arabic pages are checked on everything that does not depend on English word lists.

Search appearance

Titles follow a template such as {title} {sep} {site}, set separately for the home page, pages, posts, archives, search results and the "page not found" page. Here you can also keep author pages and date pages out of results, or send them to the home page.

Sitemap and crawlers

On the same tab, AI crawlers lets you tick the AI companies' crawlers you want to turn away (17 are listed, grouped as training, search and "when a user asks"). llms.txt is a plain list of your main pages for AI tools. IndexNow tells Bing, Yandex and similar engines the moment you publish or change a page; it is off until you switch it on.

Redirects and the 404 log

Tilo adds a 301 by itself when you change the address of a published page. Below the list you find the 404 log: the addresses visitors asked for and did not find, most asked first, each with a one-click redirect. Rules can also match a whole folder (/blog/* to /news/$1) and can be imported and exported as a CSV file.

Pages: checks, bulk editing and orphans

Edit many titles and descriptions in one place. The tab also lists pages nothing links to (menu items count as links), which search engines find hard to reach. Images lists pictures with no description and suggests one from the file name; you can fill them one by one or all at once.

The site audit

The audit asks for the home page, robots.txt, the sitemap and a page that does not exist, the way a visitor or a search engine would. It reports about 25 findings (indexability, HTTPS, redirects, canonical address, title, description, social card, structured data, sitemap and robots.txt agreement, how a missing page answers) and a score.

Tools, import and Google numbers

• Tools holds the verification codes for Google, Bing and Yandex, extra lines for robots.txt and clean-up switches (for example removing the WordPress version from the page head).
• Import brings in the titles, descriptions, focus keywords, redirects and main settings from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO or SEOPress. Nothing is deleted from the other plugin, and a "check only" run shows what would come in. Switch the other plugin off afterwards so only one prints the tags.
• Business describes your organisation (name, logo, opening hours, branches) for the structured data that search engines read.
• Google numbers shows clicks, impressions, visits and calls from your Google accounts. It needs a Google service account key that you paste once; it is stored encrypted. This part has only been tested against a simulated Google, so please tell us how it works with a real account.

14. Hardening: keeping the site safe

Many attacks on WordPress sites are not clever: they try common passwords on the sign-in page, ask for the list of users, or knock on old doors that most sites do not need. Tilo, Hardening closes those doors with switches. Every switch is off until you turn it on, and each one explains itself in plain words.

What each switch does

What is already protected, without a switch

• Every route the editor uses checks that you may edit that very page. Every dashboard screen checks your role and carries a one-time token.
• The contact form has a hidden trap, a minimum fill time and a limit per address. Visitors cannot change who receives the message.
• Text and SVG you paste are cleaned when a page is saved and again when it is drawn. Embedded videos and maps load only after a click, from a list of known hosts.
• The live search answers at most 60 requests a minute to one visitor.

The Tilo, Health checklist counts these switches too: it warns while fewer than five of the eleven are on. The full review, with what was tested, is in the file docs/hardening.md of the project. What it does not cover: a penetration test by an outside company and load testing under real traffic. Please do not treat a test site as proven safe for real visitors until those are done.

15. Export and import pages

Open Tilo, Export and import. Every page you built with Tilo is listed, and each can be written to a .json file, one page or all of them, in three kinds of file: for another site that has Tilo, for Elementor, and for Divi 5.

Moving a page to Elementor or Divi

What comes across. Headings, text, pictures, buttons, icons, icon boxes, lists, accordions and a few more become real widgets or modules you can edit in the other builder, with their colours, spacing, backgrounds and phone layout. The table on the screen shows, for each page, how many of its modules become real widgets in Elementor and in Divi. Every other module (forms, tabs, galleries, carousels and others) is kept as one block that looks exactly the same; its words are edited inside that block.

16. Deploy: move the whole site

Tilo, Deploy packs the whole website, the database, the files and, if you like, WordPress itself, into one zip, with a small installer. Put both on a new host, open the installer in a browser, and the site is there. It can also send the package to the host for you over FTP.

17. Extras and switches

Small features that sites often need live in Tilo, Extras. Each one is off until you switch it on, and nothing is loaded for a feature that is off.

Other extras: a reading progress bar, a preloader that never blocks a visitor for more than four seconds, a different tab title while the visitor is on another tab, a branded login page with your logo and colours, and small clean-ups such as hiding the WordPress version.

Components (first item of the menu) lets you switch off the parts you do not use, such as forms, popups, SEO, extras and groups of modules. A part that is off loads nothing.

18. Your theme and going back

Tilo works with its own matching theme, which the wizard can install for you. Your pages and templates stay in the plugin, not in the theme. Your earlier theme is remembered, so you can go back to it.

19. Troubleshooting and questions

The download button does nothing

Try the page in your normal browser window (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave) rather than inside another program. Check the downloads icon of the browser: some browsers hold a download there until you allow it. If you use a content blocker, try the page once with it switched off for this website.

The layout step shows no pictures

Layouts and their pictures are fetched from the Tilo website, so your computer needs a working internet connection. Reload the wizard step and wait a few seconds.

The wizard stops while building

Building fetches pictures and can take a minute. Do not close the page. If your hosting ends long requests early, press Build my website again: pages that were already made are not damaged, but a second set of pages may be added, so delete the extras from Pages.

My page looks too wide, or text is cut off on a phone

Reload the page with a hard refresh (Ctrl+F5). Browsers keep a plugin's style files for a while, and a hard refresh fetches the new ones. Version 0.1.1 and later fix a problem where some layouts made the page wider than a phone screen.

I changed something and the website did not change

Check that you pressed Save (the button should say Saved) and that the page is published. If your hosting or a cache plugin keeps pages for a while, use the Clear cache button in the black bar or clear the cache of that plugin.

Where is my old theme's header and footer?

If a page hides the theme's header and footer, or you built your own in Theme Builder, they replace the theme's. See Headers, footers and menus.

How do I remove a layout I do not want?

The pages a layout made are normal WordPress pages. Go to Pages, select them and move them to the bin.

Can I use Tilo on a site that already has pages?

Yes. The wizard only adds new pages. Nothing existing is deleted or changed without you pressing a button.

20. Keyboard shortcuts

On a Mac use Cmd in place of Ctrl. Shortcuts that change the page are ignored while you are typing in a field.

21. Words used in this guide

22. Tilo compared with other tools

Tilo is not the only way to build a WordPress site. This table puts it next to Elementor, Divi, Astra and the WordPress block editor: what Tilo gives you in one plugin that the others leave to extra plugins or to a paid version, what is the same everywhere, and what the others have that Tilo does not have yet. It was written in mid-2026 from what Tilo does today (version 0.1.3).

What Tilo gives you in one plugin, and the others do not

What is the same everywhere

What the others have and Tilo does not have yet

What is next. Tilo is a test version. New versions will add more options and more features, and this table will be updated as they arrive. The rows in the last group are where we are behind today; tell us which one matters most to you.

23. Notes for testers of this version

This is a test version (0.1.1). Your opinion is what we are after. Here is what to expect, and what is most useful to tell us.

What is still a work in progress

• Deploy was tested by installing a package into a new database and site, but sending over FTP has not yet been tried against a real host. If it fails, download the zip and the installer and upload them yourself.
• The Elementor and Divi 5 files were accepted and drawn by both builders in our tests. Please tell us how a real page looks after you import it.
• Ready-made layout text exists in English and Arabic only. For any other language you translate the copied pages yourself.
• On a few layouts, text over a photo can be hard to read on a phone. Tell us which layout and page.
• There is no automatic translation and no translated wizard yet.

What helps most when you give an opinion

1. Follow the wizard from the start as if you were a first-time user, and tell us where you hesitated or felt lost.
2. Try your own language: copy the website, change a few words, publish and look at it on a phone.
3. Change a colour and a font in Site Settings, and check that the whole site followed.
4. Edit one page: change a text, a picture and a button, and use Undo and Preview.
5. Tell us the layout name, the page, the device and, if you can, send a screenshot for anything that looks wrong.