What Kestello is
Kestello is a content management system: software you install on your own web hosting to run a website. You write pages and posts, upload images, choose how the site looks and decide who may edit it, all from an admin area in your browser. You do not need to know how to code to run a Kestello site.
This guide is for the people who run a site: owners, editors and whoever looks after the hosting. If you build themes or plugins, the developer docs are the better starting point.
What you can do with it
Write and organise content. Pages and posts are built in. You can add your own content types, such as events, team members or products, each with the fields it needs (a date, a price, a photo), without writing code. Every save keeps a revision, so you can compare versions and go back to an earlier one.
Manage images and files. Upload images once and Kestello makes the sizes your theme needs, in modern formats (WebP and AVIF) where the server supports them. You can set the focal point of a photo so it crops well at any size.
Shape how the site looks. A theme controls the design. You can change colours, fonts and spacing under Appearance → Styles, rearrange page templates under Appearance → Templates, and switch themes without losing content.
Run the site day to day. Menus, redirects (including automatic ones when you change a page's address), forms with stored submissions, site search, and a list of addresses visitors tried that did not exist.
Control who can do what. Each person signs in with their own account. Roles decide what they can reach: an editor can publish content without being able to install plugins. Two-step sign-in can be turned on per account.
Add features with plugins. Plugins add features such as search engines, mail services or social sign-in. Each plugin says up front what it will do (which services it contacts, what it stores), and Kestello shows you that before you install it. A plugin that breaks is switched off on its own instead of taking the site down.
Keep it safe. Backups of the database and files can run every night and be kept on another server or a storage service. When you update Kestello or a plugin, it backs up first, checks the site with the new version before visitors see it, and goes back to the previous version by itself if anything is wrong.
How it fits together
A Kestello site has four parts. Knowing them helps when you read the rest of this guide.
| Part | What it is | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Kestello itself | The program that runs the site and the admin | The core folder |
| Your theme | The design: layouts, colours, fonts | content/themes |
| Plugins | Extra features you chose to add | content/plugins |
| Your content and settings | Pages, posts, people, uploads, configuration | The database, storage/app (uploads) and config |
Updating Kestello replaces only the first part. Your theme, plugins, content and settings are never overwritten by an update.
How it compares to WordPress
If you have used WordPress, most ideas carry over: pages, posts, media, themes, plugins, menus and users all exist and mean the same thing. The main differences:
- Structured content is built in. Custom content types and fields need no extra plugin.
- Plugins declare what they do. You see a plugin's permissions before installing it, and plugins from the admin must be signed by a publisher your site trusts.
- Updates protect you. A failed update rolls back by itself, database included. WordPress leaves a broken site for you to restore.
- Backups and moving a site are built in. A backup made on one server restores on another, even if it uses a different database type.
Where to go next
- Check that your hosting meets the requirements.
- Install Kestello.
- Spend your first hour setting the basics up.
After that, the guide follows the admin: your content, media, menus and forms for everyday work, and backups, updates and Site Health for keeping the site in good shape. When something is not working, start with troubleshooting.